“Heavens, how silly you are, doctor!” cried Nanteuil.
“I would you spoke the truth, mademoiselle. Silliness is the capacity for happiness. It is the sovereign content. It is the prime asset in a civilized society.”
“You are paradoxical, my dear doctor,” remarked Monsieur de Ligny. “But I grant you that it is better to be silly as everybody is silly than to be clever as no one else is clever.”
“It’s true, what Robert says!” exclaimed Nanteuil, sincerely impressed. And she added thoughtfully: “At any rate, doctor, one thing is certain. It is that stupidity often prevents one from doing stupid things. I have noticed that many a time. Whether you take men or women, those are not the most stupid who act the most stupidly. For example, there are intelligent women who are stupid about men.”
“You mean those who cannot do without them.”
“There’s no hiding anything from you, my little Socrates.”
“Ah,” sighed the big Doulce, “what a terrible slavery it is! Every woman who cannot control her senses is lost to art.”
Nanteuil shrugged her pretty shoulders, which still retained something of the angularity of youth.
“Oh, my great-grandmother! Don’t try to kid the youngsters! What an idea! In your days, did actresses control their — how did you put it? Fiddlesticks! They didn’t control them a scrap!”
Noticing that Nanteuil’s temper was rising, the bulky Doulce retired with dignity and prudence. Once in the passage, she vouchsafed a further word of advice:
“Remember, my darling, to play Angélique as a ‘bud.’ The part requires it.”
But Nanteuil, her nerves on edge, took no notice.
“Really,” she said, sitting down before her dressing-table, “she makes me boil, that old Doulce, with her morality. Does she think people have forgotten her adventures? If so, she is mistaken. Madame Ravaud tells one of them six days out of seven. Everybody knows that she reduced her husband, the musician, to such a state of exhaustion that one night he tumbled into his cornet. As for her lovers, magnificent men, just ask Madame Michon. Why, in less than two years she made mere shadows of them, mere puffs of breath. That’s the way she controlled them! And supposing anyone had told her that she was lost to art!”
Dr. Trublet extended his two hands, palms outward, towards Nanteuil, as though to stop her.
“Do not excite yourself, my child. Madame Doulce is sincere. She used to love men, now she loves God. One loves what one can, as one can, and with what one has. She has become chaste and pious at the fitting age. She is diligent in the practices of her religion: she goes to Mass on Sundays and feast days, she — —”
“Well, she is right to go to Mass,” asserted Nanteuil “Michon, light a candle for me, to heat my rouge. I must do my lips again. Certainly, she is quite right to go to Mass, but religion does not forbid one to have a lover.”
“You think not?” asked the doctor.
“I know my religion better than you, that’s certain!”
A lugubrious bell sounded, and the mournful voice of the call-boy was heard in the corridors:
“The curtain-raiser is over!”
Nanteuil rose, and slipped over her wrist a velvet ribbon ornamented with a steel medallion. Madame Michon was on her knees arranging the three Watteau pleats of the pink dress, and, with her mouth full of pins, delivered herself from one corner of her lips of the following maxim:
“There is one good thing in being old, men cannot make you suffer any more.”
Robert de Ligny took a cigarette from his case.
“May I?” And he moved toward the lighted candle on the dressing-table.
Nanteuil, who never took her eyes off him, saw beneath his moustache, red and light as flame, his lips, ruddy in the candlelight, drawing in and puffing out the smoke. She felt a slight warmth in her ears. Pretending to look among her trinkets, she grazed Ligny’s neck with her lips, and whispered to him:
“Wait for me after the show, in a cab, at the corner of the Rue de Tournon.”
At this moment the sound of voices and footsteps was heard in the corridor. The actors in the curtain-raiser were returning to their dressing-rooms.
“Doctor, pass me your newspaper.”
“It is highly uninteresting, mademoiselle.”
“Never mind, pass it over.”
She took it and held it like a screen above her head.
“The light makes my eyes ache,” she observed.
It was true that a too brilliant light would sometimes give her a headache. But she had just seen herself in the glass. With her blue-tinted eyelids, her eyelashes smeared with a black paste, her grease-painted cheeks, her lips tinted red in the shape of a tiny heart, it seemed to her she looked like a painted corpse with glass eyes, and she did not wish Ligny to see her thus.
While she was keeping her face in the shadow of the newspaper a tall, lean young man entered the dressing-room with a swaggering gait. His melancholy eyes were deeply sunken above a nose like a crow’s beak; his mouth was set in a petrified grin. The Adam’s apple of his long throat made a deep shadow on his stock. He was dressed as a stage bailiff.
“That you, Chevalier? How are you, my friend?” gaily inquired Dr. Trublet, who was fond of actors, preferred the bad ones, and had a special liking for Chevalier.
“Come in, everybody!” cried Nanteuil “This isn’t a dressing-room; it’s a mill.”
“My respects, none the less, Mme. Miller!” replied Chevalier, “I warn you, there’s a pack of idiots out in front. Would you believe it — they shut me up!”
“That’s no reason for walking in without knocking,” replied Nanteuil snappishly.
The doctor pointed out that Monsieur de Ligny had left the door open; whereupon Nanteuil, turning to Ligny, said in a tone of tender reproach:
“Did you really leave the door open? But, when one comes into a room, one closes the door on other people: it is one of the first things one is taught.”
She wrapped herself in a white blanket-cloak.
The call-boy summoned the players to the stage.
She grasped the hand which Ligny offered her, and, exploring his wrist with her fingers, dug her nail into the spot, close to the veins, where the skin is tender. Then she disappeared into the dark corridor.
CHAPTER II
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 a
lso 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.
CHAPTER III
Madame Nanteuil lived with her daughter in a little flat on the fifth story of a house in the Boulevard Saint-Michel, whose windows opened upon the garden of the Luxembourg. She gave Chevalier a friendly welcome, for she thought kindly of him because he loved Félicie, and because the latter did not love him in return, and ignored on principle the fact that he had been her daughter’s lover.
She made him sit beside her in the dining-room, where a coke fire was burning in the stove. In the lamplight army revolvers and sabres with golden tassels on the sword-knots gleamed upon the wall. They were hung about a woman’s cuirass, which was provided with round breast-shields of tin-plate; a piece of armour which Félicie had worn last winter, while still a pupil at the Conservatoire, when taking the part of Joan of Arc at the house of a spiritualistic duchess. An officer’s widow and the mother of an actress, Madame Nanteuil, whose real name was Nantean, treasured these trophies.
“Félicie is not back yet, Monsieur Chevalier. I don’t expect her before midnight. She is on the stage till the end of the play.”
“I know; I was in the first piece. I left the theatre after the first act of La Mère confidente.
“Oh, Monsieur Chevalier, why didn’t you stay till the end? My daughter would have been so pleased if you had waited. When one is acting one likes to have friends in the house.”
Chevalier replied ambiguously:
“Oh, as to friends, there are plenty of those about.”
“You are mistaken, Monsieur Chevalier; good friends are scarce. Madame Doulce was there, of course? Was she pleased with Félicie?” And she added, with great humility: “I should indeed be happy if she could really make a hit. It is so difficult to come to the fore in her profession, for a girl who is alone, without support, without influence! And it is so necessary for her to succeed, poor child!”
Chevalier did not feel disposed to lavish any pity upon Félicie. With a shrug of the shoulders he replied bluntly:
“No need to worry about that. She’ll get on. She is an actress heart and soul. She has it in her bones, down to her very legs.”
Madame Nanteuil indulged in a quiet smile.
“Poor child! They are not very plump, her legs. Félicie’s health is not bad, but she must not overdo it. She often has fits of giddiness, and sick headaches.”
The servant came in to place on the table a dish of fried sausage, a bottle of wine, and a few plates.
Meanwhile, Chevalier was searching in his mind for some appropriate fashion of asking a question which had been on the tip of his tongue ever since he had set foot on the stairs. He wanted to know whether Félicie was still meeting Girmandel, whose name he never heard mentioned nowadays. We are given to conceiving desires which suit themselves to our condition. Now, in the misery of his existence, in the distress of his heart, he was full of an eager desire that Félicie, who loved him no longer, should love Girmandel, whom she loved but little, and he hoped with all his heart that Girmandel would keep her for him, would possess her wholly, and leave nothing of her for Robert de Ligny. The idea that the girl might be with Girmandel appeased his jealousy, and he dreaded to learn that she had broken with him.
Of course he would never have allowed himself to question a mother as to her daughter’s lovers. But it was permissible to speak of Girmandel to Madame Nanteuil, who saw nothing that was other than respectable in the relations of her household with the Government official, who was well-to-do, married, and the father of two charming daughters. To bring Girmandel’s name into the conversation he had only to resort to a stratagem. Chevalier hit upon one which he thought was ingenious.
“By the way,” he remarked, “I saw Girmandel just now in a carriage.”
Madame Nanteuil made no comment.
“He was driving down the Boulevard Saint-Michel in a cab. I certainly thought I recognized him. I should be greatly surprised if it wasn’t he.”
Madame Nanteuil made no comment.
“His fair beard, his high colour — he’s an easy man to recognize, Girmandel.”
Madame Nanteuil made no comment.
“You were very friendly with him at one time, you and Félicie. Do you still see him?”
“Monsieur Girmandel? Oh yes, we still see him,” replied Madame Nanteuil softly.
These words made Chevalier feel almost happy. But she had deceived him; she had not spoken the truth. She had lied out of self-respect, and in order not to reveal a domestic secret which she regarded as derogatory to the honour of her family. The truth was that, being carried away by her passion for Ligny, Félicie had given Girmandel the go-by, and he, being a man of the world, had promptly cut off supplies. Madame Nanteuil, despite her years, had resumed an old lover, out of her love for her child, that she might not want for anything. She had ren
ewed her former liaison with Tony Meyer, the picture-dealer in the Rue de Clichy. Tony Meyer was a poor substitute for Girmandel; he was none too free with his money. Madame Nanteuil, who was wise and knew the value of things, did not complain on that account, and she was rewarded for her devotion, for, in the six weeks during which she had been loved anew, she had grown young again.
Chevalier, following up his idea, inquired:
“You would hardly say that Girmandel was still a young man, would you?”
“He is not old,” said Madame Nanteuil. “A man is not old at forty.”
“A bit used up, isn’t he?”
“Oh, dear no,” replied Madame Nanteuil, quite calmly.
Chevalier became thoughtful and was silent. Madame Nanteuil began to nod. Then, being aroused from her somnolence by the servant, who brought in the salt-cellar and the water-bottle, she inquired:
“And you, Monsieur Chevalier, is all well with you?”
No, all was not well with him. The critics were out to “down” him. And the proof that they had combined against him was that they all said the same thing; they said his face lacked expression.
“My face lacking in expression!” he cried indignantly. “They should have called it a predestined face. Madame Nanteuil, I aim high, and it is that which does me harm. For example, in La Nuit du 23 octobre, which is being rehearsed now, I am Florentin: I have only six lines; it’s a washout. But I have increased the importance of the character enormously. Durville is furious. He deliberately crabs all my effects.”
Madame Nanteuil, placid and kindly, found words to comfort him. Obstacles there were, no doubt, but in the end one overcame them. Her own daughter had fallen foul of the ill-will of certain critics.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 184