Hypotheses on A Theatre Career, Redux

Luck and cunning, said Butler, who knew a thing or two about living out-of-doors, and who might be another patron saint of chasing-after-historical-figures, though I doubt whether he and Michel Foucault would have found much to talk about.

Revision: The London residence that Emma speaks of with horror during one of her lectures in Australia is 12 Tufton Street, and I now have to chase down 1850s London guide books to find out what life was like there. There was a cock-fighting pit in Tufton Street, which in the mid-1700s hosted the major fighting-cock training yards (Cockpit Yards), so we begin to get a flavor of the locale: a heterotopic space where the hoi polloi and the gentry mixed it up, cockfighting being, like speakeasies and smoking lounges, something that cuts across socioeconomic lines.

Elaboration:The Theatre des Italiens in Paris: much to dig into there. The original comic (Italian) opera house in Paris, and presently called the Opera-Comique situated on the Boulevard des Italiens (named for the theatre).

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People dressed for performances there, and attended in droves, amidst what by all accounts was bustling middle-class social behavior in the shadows of carefully-designed buildings.

Nearby, the Theatre Robert-Houdin and the French Academy Of Music, giving me a plausible ground for Emma's first period of "study" in Paris. If I can find showrooms and workshops of Erard (where a young Emma Floyd demonstrated Erard's pianos daily, we're told) in the vicinity, I'll declare victory. We know that Erard supplied the theatre's pianos.

In the end, though, it's what one finds on the margins of these threads of investigation that truly gratify. Like this street scene from the Boulevard des Italiens, at the end of the nineteenth century, from H. Sunderland Edward's Old And New Paris (1893).

Worth seeing large.