Félix GALIPAUX

Galipaux is Lucien Guitry's contemporary.
Would one suspect it, seeing Lucien Guitry majestic, powerful, laden with glory, and seeing this slender Galipaux remaining lively, nimble, ardent, mocking, endowed with an age that is no more possible to determine than it is possible to tell the age of a sparrow fluttering, pecking and squawking on the boulevard of Paris?
This skinny little man, with a pointed nose and a quiff of hair, did not seem destined to succeed in the theater, in the opinion of three great pontiffs whom he consulted, at the time of his debut. They found his height too small, his voice insufficient, his physique mediocre. Once again, the pontiffs were wrong.
Galipaux is the theater itself. He played in all those in Paris: The Barber of Seville at the Odéon; Manette Salomon at the Vaudeville; Les Surprises du Divorce at the Gymnase; The Lady from Maxim's at the Variétés; Chantecler at the Porte Saint-Martin; L'Assommoir at the Ambigu; Le Minaret at the Renaissance; Le Boute-en-Train at the Athénée; Champignol malgré lui at the Gaieté; La Princesse Sans-Gêne at the Châtelet; Panurge at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt; La Veuve Joyeuse at the Apollo; Madame and her Godchild at the Bouffes Parisiens; Le Traité d'Auteuil at the Théâtre Antoine; Mademoiselle ma Mère at the Théâtre Femina. Not to mention Cluny, the Folies Dramatiques, the Théâtre Michel, Daunou, the music halls, to which we should add most of our provincial theaters, and an impressive number of foreign stages. Phew!...
As quick as Ariel, Galipaux jumps from one train to another. Five minutes after his return from tour, he begins to rehearse for a second series of performances. And when, after a day of incessant labor, we think he is going to take a little rest, he writes plays, I counted forty of them and volumes, of which more than fifteen have appeared. He has played three hundred and seventy-seven roles, in three hundred and ninety different cities. He is a tireless man, built of steel, the metal from which springs are made, and who has never tired anyone, so much does he put pirouetting good humor, burlesque fantasy, original drollery, enormous and light at the same time, into his smallest creations.
It has never stopped for an hour. There is no reason for it to end. Unless, one evening, in a somersault higher than the others, Galipaux breaks through the ceiling of the theater and goes, to the sound of the horn and the drum, rolling in the stars and finding up there the clown of Théodore de Banville,

Paul REBOUX.