THE SPLENDID EVENTS THAT HAPPENED AT BIENVILLE
The next day François duly presented himself at the palace at twelve
o’clock for breakfast with the Bishop. Much to his disgust, the General
was present. François, who loved to fool people, assumed an air and
tone of extreme virtue, and again told, with many additions, a pretty
story of his reverses and his determination to earn an honest living
by doing juggling and acrobating, the only things he knew how to do by
which a franc could be earned. The good Bishop was lost in admiration
of François, and said:
“That, my dear M. le Bourgeois, as you call yourself, is the highest
form of virtue and respectability, is it not, my brother?”
General Bion maintained a stiff silence, which annoyed the good Bishop
exceedingly.
The General meant to sit François out, not doubting that he would
contrive to borrow a small sum of money from the Bishop before leaving.
But François held his ground, as his ancestors had held theirs on many
a hard-fought field, and the General, called away by his military
duties, had to leave the wolf in conversation with the lamb. He left a
deputy, however, in the person of Mathilde, the Bishop’s housekeeper,
an angular and ferocious person of sixty, who disapproved of the
Bishop’s fondness for picking up stray acquaintances and lost dogs and
cats and giving them the hospitality of the palace.
When François and the Bishop were left alone in the Bishop’s study,
then François laid himself out to amuse his host. Soon he had the
Bishop roaring with laughter over jokes and merry stories, and at two
o’clock it was as much as François could do to tear himself away.
By the time he was out of the room Mathilde had stalked in and
proceeded to give the Bishop a piece of her mind.
“Does your Grace remember,” she asked wrathfully, “the last adventurer
your Grace took up with, who borrowed ninety francs of your Grace and
then skipped off to Paris?”
“Yes, my good Mathilde, I know,” responded the Bishop, using a soft
answer to turn away wrath. “But this gentleman, you see--for he is
a gentleman--belongs to a family which were exceedingly kind to my
family, and especially my father. He was a laborer upon the estates of
this gentleman’s father. Think of it!”
“That shows,” cried Mathilde, “what a good-for-nothing scamp he must
have been. Who ever saw a gentleman standing on his head, like this
fellow does, and playing tricks with cards? I kept my hand upon my
purse in my pocket all the time I was serving the General and your
Grace and this ragamuffin at breakfast.”
“Mathilde,” said the Bishop, trying to be stern, “I cannot permit you
to call a guest in my house a ragamuffin.”
“Then,” cried Mathilde, “I will give him his right name, and call him a
rapscallion!” And then she flounced out of the room, banging the door
after her.
The Bishop sighed. He was a celibate, and yet he was henpecked worse
than any man in Bienville.
François, listening outside, walked away laughing and resolving to pay
off Mathilde for knowing the truth about him.
Two days after that, François again met the Bishop face to face in
the street in front of the palace, and was warmly greeted. François,
eying the clock in the cathedral steeple, saw that it was ten minutes
of twelve, and remembering the history of Scheherezade and the Arabian
Nights, began telling his crack story to the Bishop. In the midst of it
came the bells announcing noon, and the odor of broiled chops from the
kitchen window of the old stone house known as the palace. The Bishop,
like other men, was subject to temptation, and he could not do without
the end of the story, and besides he had always that excellent excuse
that his father had been a laborer upon the estates of François’ father.
“Come in,” said the Bishop, “and have breakfast with me. My brother
will not be here.”
“Thank God,” replied François. “Now, if you could get rid of that old
battleaxe of a housekeeper while we are at breakfast, it would be
better still.”
“That I can’t do,” said the Bishop ruefully. “But after all, she is
a good creature, and my brother, the General, says it if were not for
Mathilde I would never have a sous in my pocket or a coat to my back.”
“He is probably right,” answered François, taking the Bishop by the arm
as they marched up the steps. “It is your cursed good nature that will
always be giving you trouble.”
François’ reception at the hands of Mathilde was a trifle more hostile
than before.
There are some tricks of legerdemain which can be played without the
aid of a confederate. In the midst of the breakfast, while François was
telling some of his best stories, the Bishop inadvertently took his
purse from his pocket with his handkerchief, and left the purse lying
on the table. When breakfast was over, the purse was missing.
Mathilde assumed an air of triumph, and the Bishop looked very
sheepish. At once a search wits begun, Mathilde shaking the cloth,
looking under the chair occupied by François, and doing everything
except rifling his pockets. The purse contained eighty francs, a large
sum for the poor Bishop, who lived from hand to mouth. In the hunt the
dining room soon looked as if a cyclone had struck it; drawers were
pulled open, chairs knocked about, and Mathilde watched François with a
hawk’s eye.
“That is a good bit of money to let lie around in the presence of a
servant,” said François, impudently. “Come now, you woman, haven’t you
got that purse in your pocket this moment?”
Mathilde, furious, thrust her hand into her own pocket where she
carried a handkerchief, a notebook, a large bunch of keys, a
prayer-book, a rosary, and a little figure of St. Joseph in a tin case,
and her own purse. But what she brought out of her pocket was the
Bishop’s purse. The Bishop laughed long and loud, and François laughed
louder than the Bishop.
After this was over, the Bishop invited François into the study.
François, in addition to telling some of his best stories, proceeded
to go through some of his most comic antics. The good Bishop laughed
until he cried, and excused himself on that ever excellent plea about
his father being a laborer on the estates of François’ father. Then
François went to a wheezy old piano in the room and began to play and
sing some simple old songs of the Bishop’s youth--the songs his mother
had sung to him in the laborer’s cottage in the meadows. Presently the
tears were trickling down the Bishop’s face.
“Go on, M. le Bourgeois,” he said tremulously. “I love those simple old
airs that take me back to my childhood when my good mother worked for
us all day, and then had the heart to sing to us in the evening. As
you sing, I can hear in my heart the tinkling of the cow-bells and the
sharp little cries of the birds under the thatched roof--for our roof
was only thatch, you remember. Oh, my mother, my dear, dear mother!
Her hands were hard with toil, her back was bent with hanging over
washing-tubs and the soup pot on the fire; but in Heaven I know she is
straight and soft of hand, and one day all her children will surround
her and pay her homage as if she, the peasant mother, were a queen!”
François continued to play soft chords, the Bishop listening and
sighing and smiling. Presently François heard from the Bishop’s big
chair a gentle snore. Then François, rising noiselessly, pulled off his
own shoes, which were cracked, and with professional sleight-of-hand
took off the Bishop’s new shoes, which he put on his own feet, and
then slipped his own shoes on the Bishop’s feet. There was a desk
in the room, and François scribbled on a piece of paper, “I would
have taken your Grace’s stockings, but they are cotton. If I were a
bishop, I would wear silk stockings. I hope your Grace will remedy this
impropriety, and in the future wear silk stockings worth the taking.”
This scrap of paper he pinned to the Bishop’s cassock, and went softly
out through a door opening on a balcony, from which he swung himself
down into the garden. As he walked along, he saw a row of beehives
on a bench. Stepping gently, he took off his coat and threw it over
a beehive, and then lifting it carried it out into the street. A
policeman stopped him, saying:
“What have you got there, my man?”
“A beehive,” replied François, “just out of a hothouse, and the bees
very active.”
The policeman suddenly backed off, and François marched away with his
beehive, which he subsequently threw over the stone wall around the
Bishop’s garden.
Meanwhile the Bishop waked, and reading the piece of paper, looked down
at his feet to find full confirmation of François’ words. In the midst
of it, Mathilde tore into the room.
“Well, your Grace,” bawled Mathilde, “what does your Grace think of
your rowdy friend now? He stole a beehive off the bench as he went by.
Pierre, the cobbler’s boy, was passing and saw him and told the cook
who told the footman who told me, and I went out, and the beehive is
gone! And look at your Grace’s feet! The wretch actually stole your
Grace’s shoes!”
“Why do you speak with such violence?” said the Bishop, loath to lose,
for a single pair of shoes and a beehive, the joy of François’ company.
“Suppose I meet a man whom I have known as a boy, when I was in very
humble circumstances and he was very high up in the world, and suppose
that man’s shoes are worn, and I choose to give him a good pair and
take his in return? Is that anybody’s business except my own? And
suppose I gave him the beehive by way of a joke, you know?”
“It would be exactly like your Grace,” snapped Mathilde. “But it was
the only good pair of shoes your Grace had in the world, and I shall
have to go out into the town immediately to buy your Grace another
pair.”
“Do,” said the Bishop, delighted to get rid of Mathilde on any terms.
When the door had slammed after the excellent Mathilde, the Bishop drew
a long sigh of relief.
“I did not tell a single lie,” he said to himself; “I merely stated a
hypothetical case. After all, the poor fellow needed the shoes, and he
turned it into a pleasantry. I owed him that much for the hearty laughs
he gave me, and for singing my mother’s old songs to me.”
The Bishop was always meeting François in the street after that; it was
as if François were lying in wait for him, and by the simple expedient
of beginning a good story, or intimating that he had a merry song, just
as they reached the gates of the Bishop’s palace, François could always
get a meal.
The affair of the purse had made Mathilde his mortal enemy, and she
complained to the General that the Bishop was giving scandal by having
that acrobat and juggler, François What’s-his-name, to breakfast at
the palace about three times a week. General Bion, who was punctilious
beyond any maiden lady in Bienville, felt it his duty to remonstrate
with his brother about having François so often at the palace.
“But, my brother,” mildly urged the Bishop, “you would not have me,
the son of our father, a laborer, uppish to the son of the Count
d’Artignac. And besides, François has a good heart, and I am trying to
bring him to penitence and to leave his present uncertain mode of life
and to settle down somewhere. I think he is very amenable to grace, and
I shall succeed in doing much with him. And then, he sings to me the
songs our mother sang--ah, me!”
The General was silenced for the time, but Mathilde gave him privately
some valuable information. It was true that whenever she came into
the study François was always talking about his soul, and his desire
to repent. But as soon as her back was turned she could hear sounds
of laughter--François was none too good to be laughing at her--and
sometimes she thought she heard the patter of feet, like dancing. It
could not be his Grace. If the General could pay an unexpected call
some day after François had breakfasted at the palace--
The General took the hint, and one day when he had seen François going
into the palace arm in arm with the Bishop, the General bided his time.
When he knew breakfast was over, he unceremoniously opened the door
of the Bishop’s study. Mathilde was close behind him. There sat the
Bishop in his great arm-chair, his hands crossed upon his waistcoat his
mouth open as if it were on hinges, while François, in a ballet costume
improvised from a table-cloth, was doing a beautiful skirt dance and
carolling at the top of his lungs one of the gayest of the music hall
songs. The entrance of the General was like a paralytic shock. The
Bishop forgot to close his mouth, and François stood with one leg in
the air.
“Good morning, brother,” said General Bion sarcastically. “So this is
bringing M. le Bourgeois to penitence and reforming his wandering life.
I am afraid he is laying up material for you as a penitent.”
The poor Bishop knew not where to look nor what to say, but François,
with unblushing impudence, ran behind the General, caught Mathilde in
his arms, and proceeded to do a high kicking waltz with her, in spite
of her screams and protests and fighting like a tiger. Not even the
General could stand that with gravity; he laughed in spite of himself.
After that day, when François breakfasted at the palace the General had
a way of dropping in, and there would be an audience of two instead of
one to the antics of François in the good Bishop’s study.
Meanwhile, things went on in the lodgings opposite the Hotel Metropole
without the slightest change. The Marquis still haunted the place,
and Diane still gave him rare interviews in the presence of Madame
Grandin. François chaffed her unmercifully about this prudery, but Jean
encouraged her.
“Don’t let that man see you alone,” said Jean sternly to Diane. “A
marquis and a cheap music-hall singer is a bad combination.”
“It is because you are jealous, Jean,” said Diane frankly, at which
Jean looked at her with an expression so piteous, so heartrending, in
his honest eyes, that even Diane was touched.
One afternoon about three weeks after Diane’s adventure in the maze
with the Marquis, it was the same sort of an afternoon, the white fog
from the river enveloping the town like a muslin veil, and making a
mysterious light that was neither day nor night, darkness nor light.
Diane, on going out for her walk, determined to live over that hour of
tumultuous joy in the maze, to indulge her imagination in the notion
that there she should meet the Marquis. She started out, therefore,
tripping lightly along, and made straight for the park. Once more she
entered the wide driveway, half veiled in the floating white mist,
and with an unerring instinct, she found the opening to the maze. As
she walked between the tall, green walls of the clipped cedars, she
felt a hand laid on her shoulder, and looking up, there was Egmont,
his military cap sitting, as ever, jauntily on his handsome head, his
cavalry cloak draped about him like the mantle of a young Greek.
“I caught sight of you as you came out of the house, and I followed
you here. Don’t you suppose that I have lived over in imagination the
half-hour we spent in this place? And then think how tantalizing it is
to sit up in that stuffy room and talk to you across the table in the
presence of that silly creature, Madame Grandin.”
“She isn’t silly, she is one of the best women-jugglers in the
profession,” answered Diane, loyal and illogical as ever.
There was no resisting him on the part of poor Diane, and presently
they were sitting on the bench together, Diane’s soft, cool cheek
resting against the Marquis’ mustache. Presently he said:
“Now, what do you suppose I followed you here for, besides these sweet
kisses? Your obstinacy has conquered at last. Will you be my wife,
Diane?”
Diane gave a great gasp, and before Egmont knew what she was doing, she
had slipped to the damp ground and was kneeling against him, weeping
and laughing.
“Do you mean it? Do you really mean it?” she was crying.
“Of course I mean it,” said the Marquis, lifting her up once more on
the bench beside him. “You are one of those women, Diane, who can make
their own terms with men.”
“I will never be the least trouble to you,” said Diane, still weeping;
“I never will be in your way; I will never utter a complaint. I know
what it means for you, but I will efface myself. I will go to live in a
hovel in the country if you like. All I ask is a little love.”
“That you shall have,” said the Marquis, kissing her red lips. “Not
a little, but an immense deal. And as for living in the country, it
is quite true, Diane, that you would be happier and better off living
quietly and out of sight for a while, until you learn how to be a
marquise. I am thirty years old, and I have no family, so there is no
one to protest. The chateau of Egmont is leased, because, to tell you
the truth, Diane, I am a poor man. But I have a little shooting-box an
hour from Bienville where you could live very comfortably, eh, Diane? A
little box of a house with a garden and lilac hedges around it, and a
summer-house and some trees and fields and a little river where I often
go to fish when I am off duty. Now if you were there--!”
The prospect was so dazzling to Diane that she had to close her eyes to
see the splendid vision, and her lips could only whisper:
“A summer-house, a lilac hedge! Oh, glory, glory! One maid will be
enough!”
When her first rapture of gratitude and joy was over, Diane, ever
practical, said trembling:
“I am willing to live quietly and never to bother you, but I want my
people, the Grandins and François and Jean, to know that I am really
married to you. I could not live--I could not live, if they don’t know
it.”
“Certainly,” answered the Marquis readily. “You see, I really belong
in the district where the shooting-box lies. My Colonel will ask me
questions, for an officer can’t get married on the sly, but trust me
to manage that. Let me see, I can get three days’ leave three weeks
from to-day; this is Saturday. You and I and Madame Grandin can go to
the little place and the civil and religious ceremonies can both be
performed the same day.”
“And M. Grandin and François and Jean can go too?” asked Diane
anxiously.
“What’s the use?” replied Egmont. “Grandin will be certain to talk
too much in that rumbling big voice of his, and create remark. As for
François and that great, hulking Jean, I object to them decidedly. You
will need two witnesses. Madame Grandin is one, and I can find another
at my place.”
Diane remained silent; a great lump was rising in her throat. But the
idea came into her mind, “This is the first thing he has asked me.
Shall I refuse him and make it unpleasant for him when he is doing me
the greatest honor in the world?”
They remained sitting on the bench and exchanging the sweet nothings of
lovers until the faint sound of the church bell again startled Diane,
when, as before, she rose and ran panting through the park and along
the streets until she reached the lodgings. Once more she found them
all at supper, and, as before, she sat pale and silent and eating no
supper, but her eyes were glorified. Jean looked at her with a heavy
heart; he knew without telling that she had seen the Marquis.
When supper was over, the table cleared away, and they were about
starting for the little music hall, Diane, looking about her, said in
her most dramatic manner:
“Listen, all of you. I said I knew something splendid would befall me
in Bienville. It has come this afternoon. The Marquis Egmont de St.
Angel asked me to marry him, to become his wife, to be a marquise. Oh,
how glad I was!”
Madame Grandin clasped Diane in her arms, while Grandin sank on a
chair overwhelmed with the magnificence of the thing. Neither Jean nor
François spoke.
“I shall maintain a dignified silence with the reporters,” said
Grandin, “and refuse to say a word upon the subject of whether Diane is
to marry the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel or not. But I shall meanwhile
write a circumstantial account of everything, mentioning all our names
as frequently as possible, and send it to all the Paris newspapers,
anonymously of course.”
François threw himself back in another chair and laughed uproariously.
“I always said, Skinny,” he cried, “that you were the most obstinate,
pig-headed, impudent, determined creature that was ever on this planet.
Here you have actually bullied a marquis into making you an offer of
marriage!”
Jean, almost as pale as Diane, spoke composedly:
“I wish you happiness, Diane,” he said. “Now, tell us all about it.”
“We are to be married this day three weeks,” said Diane. “When I think
of it I am so happy I feel as if I could fly. The Marquis has a little
shooting-box an hour from here, and we are to drive there, the Marquis
and I and Madame Grandin. She will be one of my witnesses, and the
Marquis will provide the other. The civil and religious ceremonies will
both take place the same day. The Marquis says his colonel will take a
hand in the business, but that he can manage that.”
A slight chill fell upon all present. Diane, realizing it, blushed and
felt every inch a traitor. Then Jean spoke:
“It seems to me, Diane,” he said, “that you ought to have some man
friend with you, M. Grandin, for example. Not that _I_ wish to go. Oh,
no, not for a moment!”
As Jean said these words, his strong, clean-shaven face was distorted
for an instant. Everybody knew that he least of any one in the world
wished to see Diane married to another man.
“Diane is a quick study,” said François, laughing, “but it will take
her all of three weeks to learn her part as a marquise. It is the best
joke I ever heard--a joke on her, and on my cousin the Marquis, and on
all of us!”
“I left it all to him,” said Diane, bursting into tears. “I could not
find fault with him when he was doing me the greatest honor in the
world, and he a marquis. And then,” she continued, recovering herself
and speaking boldly, “I am as good as twelve men and a boy, anyhow to
take care of myself.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” broke in Madame Grandin, cheerfully. “Marquises
have their own way of doing things quite different from people like
ourselves. The thing is, now, to get some one in Diane’s place and
rehearse her so she can appear this night three weeks.”
At that Diane wept afresh. There was a strange shock in the thought
of some one else in her place; she began to realize the tremendous
dislocation of her life which was coming. This feeling grew upon her
as she entered the little music hall, and she acted her part with
extraordinary power, born of her beating heart, the tension of her soul.
When the performance was over, and she was putting on her hat in the
little canvas den, she found herself trembling and weeping a little,
and called to Jean in the next den, and he came to her.
“Oh, Jean!” she said, “think, in three weeks it will be the last time
that I shall ever step upon the stage again! It will be the last time
that I shall ever see those hundreds of eyes full of interest in me,
and good will! It will be the last time that I shall make up and wear
funny little short skirts, showing my ankles that are so nice! And
I do so love to show my ankles! And it will be the last time that I
shall ever see any of you as Diane, your fellow-player! After that, I
shall be a marquise, the happiest person in the world, no doubt, but I
shall never feel quite at ease with any of you again. I shall always
be watching and thinking that I am being too kind to you or not kind
enough. Oh, Jean!”
And then Diane did a strange thing for the happiest person in the
world; she burst into a passion of tears.
“It’s enough to make you cry,” answered Jean stolidly. “You are being
removed from one world into another. In our stage world everything
goes right, and the villain is always punished before the curtain
comes down. That’s why it is the theatre is a necessity of life; it
represents the ideal world where the sinner always repents and is
forgiven, and where lovers are always united in the end, and where the
scoundrel is paid in full. We, who live in this ideal world, find the
real world very dull in comparison.”
“That’s why, I suppose, I feel so badly about leaving the stage. But I
never thought of anything to-day, when I felt Egmont’s arms around me
and his lips were upon mine.”
Jean gave a strangled cry, and sat down heavily on the box which was
the only seat in the little den.
“A man can’t stand everything, Diane!” he cried desperately. “In the
name of God, don’t tell me anything more like that!”
“You mustn’t take it so hard, Jean,” said Diane, drying her eyes.
“After all, I am only one woman out of millions and millions of them,
and you are so nice and so good and act and sing so well, I am sure you
could marry some girl much higher up in the profession than I am. And
then, everybody has a thorn in the heart. Come, let us start home. The
Marquis does not need to dog my steps now.”
The Grandins had already left, and Diane walked home between François,
who joined them outside, and Jean. François called her Madame la
Marquise, and made all sorts of good-natured fun of her. Jean was glum
and silent.
When the two men parted with Diane on the landing and went up to their
garret, their beds separated only with a canvas curtain, François
slapped Jean on the back, and said:
“Never mind, old man! It’s easy enough to forget a woman.”
Jean turned on François a look of contempt.
Jean undressed quickly and laid down upon his hard bed, but not to
sleep. He would not give François a chance to gibe at him next day
about a sleepless night, and so lay rigidly still in the blackness of
the long, low-ceiled garret.
He knew when it was one o’clock by the sound across the street of
the closing of the Hotel Metropole, the banging of shutters, and the
barring of gates. By some strange psychic intimation he knew that
François, although perfectly quiet, was as wide awake as he. Presently,
he heard strange sounds from the other side of the canvas partition,
something like suppressed sobs and groans. Jean, thinking François was
ill, drew aside a corner of the canvas at the end. François was huddled
in a heap on the floor, clasping his knees and rocking back and forth,
while strangled sobs and smothered cries burst from him. Jean, abashed,
returned to his own bed.
The next morning, a bouquet of roses and a little note arrived from
the Marquis. This gave unalloyed happiness to two persons--Diane and
Grandin.
“A bouquet for a lady in my company from a marquis!” cried Grandin.
“It’s enough to make a man mad with joy!”
Before breakfast Diane sallied forth, and came back bringing a book on
etiquette which she immediately proceeded to study diligently.
When they all assembled for the twelve o’clock dinner, Diane could
scarcely be torn away from her book.
“You see,” she said to the assembled table, “I have got to learn how to
behave like a marquise--and all in three weeks.”
“_You_ behave like a marquise!” said Jean, somewhat rudely, and
laughing. “You will be about as comfortable as a mackerel in a gravel
walk! Excuse me, Diane.”
“Yes, I will excuse you,” said Diane, serenely. “You have been so good
to me for so long, and now I have but eighteen more performances with
you.”
Her lips trembled a little at this, but she quickly resumed:
“The book says that a girl must never see her fiancé alone, and a
fiancé should not call oftener than twice a week. That I shall arrange,
and Madame Grandin will stay with me.”
At this, even Jean laughed.
“How about your trousseau, my dear?” asked François, “especially your
court costumes?”
“That will have to come later,” replied Diane. “I shall be so busy
seeing the Marquis, and studying up this book, and trying to help you
with the new girl that I sha’n’t have time to get a regular trousseau.
Besides, I don’t want to spend as much as three hundred and four
francs, which I have now, in a hurry. It is a great deal of money, and
I must think over it and look well about before I spend it. I have
my nice white muslin trimmed with lace at fifteen sous the yard, and
I can wash and iron it so beautifully it will look like new. I shall
be obliged to buy a wedding veil and wreath, but, by looking around a
little, I think I can get one for five or six francs. How amusing it
will be when I am a marquise thinking about these things!”
Grandin set on foot plans to secure a young lady in Diane’s place.
In this, he was immediately rewarded, and succeeded in getting
Mademoiselle Rose le Roi, as she called herself, a strapping young
woman, blonde and beautiful, and as tall as Jean, and exactly the
opposite of Diane in every respect. In this, lay a pain new and
sharp for Diane. She had hoped that Mademoiselle le Roi would prove
excessively stupid. On the contrary, the young woman turned out to be
very bright.
No one knows the meaning of pain who has not suffered jealousy. The
iron entered into Diane’s soul when she overheard Grandin saying to his
wife that the new girl would soon be as good an actress as Diane, and
was much handsomer, which was the truth. And everybody was so taken up
with rehearsing Mademoiselle Rose; Diane felt herself already thrust
out from that ideal world of the stage which to her was the real world.
True, the anticipated joy of being married to the man she adored lost
none of its delicious charm, its soft seductiveness, but with it was
mingled much real suffering, and a strange and awful dislocation of
life.
In those three weeks, Diane was so torn by powerful emotions of all
sorts, love, pain, grief, jealousy, fear, triumph, and a thousand other
minor things, that she neither ate nor slept, and grew even thinner
than ever. And Mademoiselle Rose was so fresh and fair! Nevertheless,
Diane’s acting did not suffer. On the contrary, like the poor princess
who had burning needles in her shoes, Diane was keyed up to do better
work than ever in her life. Never had been her comedy so good. Off
the stage, she had no more humor than a cat; on the stage, she could
throw an audience into spasms of merriment. Her voice, too, had in it a
celestial thrill that made her little songs move to laughter or bring
to tears as never before.
The Marquis was often at the music hall in those evenings, and Diane
unconsciously played directly at him.
Every night, as she made up before her little scrap of a mirror in the
canvas den, she would think to herself, as a condemned person thinks of
the day of execution:
“There are but ten more nights for me.”
And the next night:
“There are but nine left.”
As to the Marquis’ visits, which Diane rigidly fixed at two a week, and
had her own way about it, as she always did, they, like everything else
in the extraordinary time, were full of joy and pain. First, was the
joy of being with him, of hearing his delightful voice, and seeing him
in his beautiful uniform, and the stupendous triumph of it all to her.
At these visits, Madame Grandin, frightened half to death, was always
present. Diane invariably rose in a stately manner at the end of half
an hour--her book of etiquette prescribed that--and the Marquis, acting
just as the book said all fiancés should, complained bitterly of being
turned out, and promised reprisals.
It was a strange time to all who were drawn within the whirlpool of
emotion that dashed them around in a circle of agitation, stunned
and amazed them, made them to be envied and pitied, and in short, as
François said, they were exhibited as the puppets of the great God.