Maurice Chevalier

Maurice Chevalier is presented in Jean-Paul Sartre’s account not through biography or direct action, but as the absent performer whom Franconay makes imaginatively present on a music-hall stage. Their deliberately conspicuous physical contrast clarifies Sartre’s central point: an audience’s recognition does not arise from resemblance alone. It depends on signs that guide interpretation and on the spectators’ knowledge and feeling, which together animate the performer’s body as an image of Maurice Chevalier.

Identity and Function in Sartre’s Example

The account identifies Maurice Chevalier as the man Franconay is impersonating. The contrast is explicit: Chevalier is tall, thin, and light-haired, whereas Franconay is short, plump, and dark-haired. Her body therefore cannot provide a close physical likeness. For Sartre, that mismatch makes the performance analytically useful: it brings into view the work that ordinary portraiture, with its stronger resemblance, can conceal.

Chevalier’s place in the discussion is consequently a role within an example about consciousness, not a narrated career or personal history. The passage supplies no account of his private life, motives, or response to the impersonation. What it examines is how spectators arrive at the recognition that the performer onstage signifies Chevalier, and how that recognition changes their way of apprehending Franconay.

Signs and the Audience’s Recognition

At first, the audience’s attention is oriented toward the general situation of imitation. It is directed through the performer toward an as-yet unspecified person: someone is being imitated, but the target has not been identified. Sartre describes this initial orientation as empty attention. It gives the spectator two linked tasks: determine who the object of the imitation is from the available signs, then imagine that person through the imitator.

Franconay’s straw hat supplies a crucial sign. She wears it at an angle, protrudes her lower lip, and inclines her head forward. The spectator does not have to perceive the hat as a faithful copy of an item worn by Chevalier; instead, the hat first refers to him. Deciphering the signs yields the identification, and with that judgment the focus of consciousness changes: the spectator now imagines Chevalier through Franconay. The setting, programme, title, and actors’ ways of addressing one another can perform comparable guiding functions in a play.

This is why Sartre rejects an account in which resemblance first produces an image in the mind and comparison follows afterward. The imitation remains approximate, and its bodily matter can be read in two ways: as Chevalier imaged, or simply as a small woman making expressions. Signs orient the audience, but they do not mechanically compel one interpretation. The spectator’s consciousness performs the synthesis that makes the intended figure appear.

Affective Synthesis and an Unstable Image

Recognition involves more than identifying visible cues. Sartre argues that perception carries an affective response, and that feeling is directed toward its object. In the imitation, the knowledge awakened by the signs and the beginnings of intuitive recognition call forth an affective sense associated with Chevalier. That quality then seems to appear in Franconay’s face and body, joining the sparse signs and giving them expressive unity and depth.

The material provided by the imitation is particularly limited. It offers a few relations rather than a full likeness, including the angle of the hat against the ears and the relation between neck and chin. Some relations are deliberately exaggerated: the hat’s angle is made more striking because it is the principal sign around which the others are organized. A portrait presents a complex subject from which viewers must extract characteristic features; the imitation begins with selected characteristics already reduced to a scheme. Chevalier’s recognizable presence is thus not a complete physical reproduction but an image organized around a small number of expressive cues.

The resulting experience can remain unsettled. Franconay’s individual face and body may not disappear entirely, even while Chevalier’s expressive character seems to show through them. Sartre describes this as a hybrid condition, neither fully perception nor fully image. It is unstable, but can be especially pleasurable to the spectator precisely because the two apprehensions have not cleanly separated. Recognition is not simply a final substitution of one person for another; the living performer and the imagined Chevalier can remain perceptible together.

The Body as an Analogon

Franconay’s body does not become an image of Chevalier by resembling him. It functions as the material through which signs and affective meaning allow the audience to imagine him. Sartre describes the relation as one of possession: the absent Chevalier appears through the body of a woman, and the imitator is, in this sense, possessed by the figure she manifests. The claim concerns the structure of the performance, not a literal transformation or a biographical relationship between the two performers.

The example anticipates Sartre’s broader account of performance. An actor’s body can serve as an analogon for an imagined character; the performer’s gestures and feelings are used to present that character without making the actor identical to the role. In Franconay’s imitation, the same distinction is sharpened by the obvious physical difference between performer and target. Chevalier is present as the object of the audience’s imaginative act, while Franconay remains the real body through which that object is made manifest.

Significance for the Theory of Art

The Chevalier example demonstrates how a performance can guide imaginative attention without relying on likeness. A stage image is built from more than the performer’s appearance: signs orient the audience, knowledge supplies what is not directly shown, and affective response gives the selected features their expressive coherence. As a story develops, the audience may also draw on information accumulated from the play itself or from previous acquaintance with it. Imaginative recognition is therefore an active synthesis, not a passive response to resemblance.

This distinction also explains why the image can be vivid while its material basis remains scant. The audience does not mistake Franconay’s body for Chevalier’s real body; it apprehends Chevalier through her. In Sartre’s wider account of fiction and drama, material or verbal analogons make imagined objects available without turning them into real objects. The impersonation makes that principle concrete: Chevalier’s theatrical presence belongs to the spectators’ image, while the signs and the body that support it belong to the actual performance.