Rene Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844)

More than any other theatrical personage, Pixérécourt is responsible for the extraordinary success of melodrama in the 19th Century. A prolific author, Pixérécourt was also an innovative regisseur who staged his own plays. He was widely pirated, usually without acknowledgement.

Son of a petty noble, Major Charles Nicolas Georges Guilbert, who invested his fortune in a speculative stab at a marquisate in 1789 only to lose all in the Revolution, Rene at 17 was obliged by his father to take up arms for the Royalists against the Revolutionary government. (His father had shockingly bad timing...)

From that day, Rene's life contained a great many elements of the melodrama: his first love, Clotilde,taught him German in a picturesque ruined abbey while he was soldiering for the Royalists in the cantonment of Ernst. Earnest vows of undying fidelity were exchanged when he was transferred to the Army of the Ardennes and when he returned to claim his ideal love some time later, she was dead at sixteen. Just prior to his return to the departed Clotilde, Rene obtained leave and was traveling toward home disguised as a beggar when he aroused the suspicions of the gendarmerie of Pont-á-Mousson, fled, and hid in a ditch, hearing the searcher's oaths nearby until nightfall, when he could make his escape. When his leave expired, he deserted and ended up in Paris in the garret apartment of an old schoolmate, Michel. Says Pixérécourt, "I lived in an attic, exposed to pay at any moment the death penalty for having oveyed my father in in leaving France at the age of seventeen. Alone, three hundred leagues from my people, I awaited death daily, hourly, in the blood-stained capital. Each night after watching the death-carts go by loaded with victims for the slaugyhter, noble souls whose courage I admired and whose example I resolved to imitate when my time came, I would throw muyself on my wretched bed. It can easily be imagined that my thought were of the deepest black."

Is it any wonder Pixérécourt was the first consciously to write melodrama? He began his theatrical career by adapting two novels for the stage, the success of which propelled him into the management of Paris' Théâtre de l'Ambigu where ehe adapted the building for use by the curcuses. He added a large orchestra and scenarios with melodramatic elements to enliven the circus tableaux. He was so successful that he soon moved to the larger Gaîté, where he added volcanoes and explosions to the delight of all. He even did a play starring a dog in 1814, Le Chien de Montargis. In its pirated Dublin version, the play occasioned a riot when the dog disappeared and could not be found or replaced for two weeks. In all he wrote over 100 plays such as Victor, or the Child of the Forest (1798).

Pixérécourt supposedly wrote for the illiterate, but he left two major critical works about his art. Le Mélodrame was an apologia for his favored genre and Derniéres réfexions sur le mélodrame was a kind of textbook for those wishing to imitate the style.