Chevalier, having resumed his ordinary clothes, sat in a corner box,
beside Madame Doulce, gazing at Félicie, a small remote figure on the
stage. And remembering the days when he had held her in his arms, in his
attic in the Rue des Martyrs, he wept with grief and rage.
They had met last year at a fête given under the patronage of Lecureuil,
the deputy; a benefit performance given in aid of poor actors of the
ninth _arrondissement_. He had prowled around her, dumb, famishing, and
with blazing eyes. For a whole fortnight he had pursued her incessantly.
Cold and unmoved, she had appeared to ignore him. Then, suddenly, she
surrendered; so suddenly that when he left her that day, still radiant
and amazed, he had said a stupid thing. He had told her: "And I took you
for a little bit of china!" For three whole months he had tasted joys
acute as pain. Then Félicie had grown elusive, remote, and estranged.
She loved him no longer. He sought the reason, but could not discover
it. It tortured him to know that he was no longer loved; jealousy
tortured him still more. It was true that in the first beautiful hours
of his love he had known that Félicie had a lover, one Girmandel, a
court bailiff, who lived in the Rue de Provence, and he had felt it
deeply. But as he never saw him he had formed so confused and
ill-defined an idea of him that his jealousy lost itself in uncertainty.
Félicie assured him that she had never been more than passive in her
intercourse with Girmandel, that she had not even pretended to care for
him. He believed her, and this belief gave him the keenest satisfaction.
She also told him that for a long time past, for months, Girmandel had
been nothing more than a friend, and he believed her. In short, he was
deceiving the bailiff, and it was agreeable to him to feel that he
enjoyed this advantage. He had learned also that Félicie, who was just
finishing her second year at the Conservatoire, had not denied herself
to her professor. But the grief which he had felt because of this was
softened by a time-honoured and venerable custom. Now Robert de Ligny
was causing him intolerable suffering. For some time past he had found
him incessantly dangling about her. He could not doubt that she loved
Robert; and although he sometimes told himself that she had not yet
given herself to this man, it was not that he believed it, but merely
that he was fain sometimes to mitigate the bitterness of his
sufferings.
Mechanical applause broke out at the back of the theatre, and a few
members of the orchestra, murmuring inaudibly, clapped their hands
slowly and noiselessly. Nanteuil had just given her last reply to Jeanne
Perrin.
"_Brava! Brava!_ She is delightful, dear little woman!" sighed Madame
Doulce.
In his jealous anger, Chevalier was disloyal. Lifting a finger to his
forehead, he remarked:
"She plays with _that_." Then, placing his hand upon his heart, he
added: "It is with this that one should act."
"Thanks, dear friend, thanks!" murmured Madame Doulce, who read into
these maxims an obvious eulogy of herself.
She was, indeed, in the habit of asserting that all good acting comes
from the heart; she maintained that, to give full expression to a
passion, it was necessary to experience it, and to feel in one's own
person the expressions that one wished to represent. She was fond of
referring to herself as an example of this. When appearing as a tragedy
queen, after draining a goblet of poison on the stage, her bowels had
been on fire all night. Nevertheless she was given to saying: "The
dramatic art is an imitative art, and one imitates an emotion all the
better for not having experienced it." And to illustrate this maxim she
drew yet further examples from her triumphant career.
She gave a deep sigh.
"The child is admirably gifted. But she is to be pitied; she has been
born into a bad period. There is no longer a public nowadays; no
critics, no plays, no theatres, no artists. It is a decadence of art."
Chevalier shook his head.
"No need to pity her," he said. "She will have all that she can wish;
she will succeed; she will be wealthy. She is a selfish little jade, and
a woman who is selfish can get anything she likes. But for people with
hearts there's nothing left but to hang a stone round one's neck and
throw oneself into the river. But, I too, I shall go far. I, too, shall
climb high. I, too, will be a selfish hound."
He got up and went out without waiting for the end of the play. He did
not return to Félicie's dressing-room for fear of meeting Ligny there,
the sight of whom was insupportable, and because by avoiding it he could
pretend to himself that Ligny had not returned thither.
Conscious of physical distress on going away from her, he took five or
six turns under the dark, deserted arcades of the Odéon, went down the
steps into the night, and turned up the Rue de Médicis. Coachmen were
dozing on their boxes, while waiting for the end of the performance, and
high over the tops of the plane-trees the moon was racing through the
clouds. Treasuring in his heart an absurd yet soothing remnant of hope,
he went, this night, as on other nights, to wait for Félicie at her
mother's flat.