A Romance of Youth — Volume 3

This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
By FRANCOIS COPPEE
Success, which usually is as fickle as justice, took long strides and doubled its stations in order to reach Amedee. The Cafe de Seville, and the coterie of long-haired writers, were busying themselves with the rising poet already. His suite of sonnets, published in La Guepe, pleased some of the journalists, who reproduced them in portions in well- distributed journals. Ten days after Amedee's meeting with Jocquelet, the latter recited his poem Before Sebastopol at a magnificent entertainment given at the Gaite for the benefit of an illustrious actor who had become blind and reduced to poverty.
This dramatic solemnity, to use the language of the advertisement, began by being terribly tiresome. There was an audience present who were accustomed to grand Parisian soirees, a blase and satiated public, who, upon this warm evening in the suffocating theatre, were more fatigued and satiated than ever. The sleepy journalists collapsed in their chairs, and in the back part of the stage-boxes, ladies' faces, almost green under paint, showed the excessive lassitude of a long winter of pleasure. The Parisians had all come there from custom, without having the slightest desire to do so, just as they always came, like galley-slaves condemned to first nights. They were so lifeless that they did not even feel the slightest horror at seeing one another grow old. This chloroformed audience was afflicted with a long and too heavy programme, as is the custom in performances of this kind. They played fragments of the best known pieces, and sang songs from operas long since fallen into disuse even on street organs. This public saw the same comedians march out; the most famous are the most monotonous; the comical ones abused their privileges; the lover spoke distractedly through his nose; the great coquette—the actress par excellence, the last of the Celimenes— discharged her part in such a sluggish way that when she began an adverb ending in ment, one would have almost had time to go out and smoke a cigarette or drink a glass of beer before she reached the end of the said adverb.