"Right.... Well, Nero, who poisoned his cousin Britannicus, disembowelled his mother Agrippina, strangled his wife Octavia, killed his wife Poppæa with a kick in the stomach, had a tenor voice, after the style of Ponchard; only his style was less cultivated, and occasionally he sang false! That did not matter whilst Nero sang before his roystering companions or before his courtesans at the Palatine or Maison-Dorée; neither was it of much consequence when Nero sang as he watched Rome burn: the Romans were too much occupied with the fire to pay any attention to a semi-tone too high or a flat too low. But when he took it into his head to sing in a public theatre, it was a different matter: every time the illustrious tenor deviated in the slightest degree from musical correctness, some spectator allowed himself—what I shall permit myself to do immediately, if you insist on my remaining to the end of this silly melodrama—to whistle. Of course the spectator was arrested and promptly flung to the lions; but as he passed before Nero, instead of saying simply, according to custom, 'Augustus, he who is about to die salutes thee!' he said,'Augustus, I am to die because you sang false; but when I am dead, you will not sing the more correctly.' This final salutation, taken up and added to by other culprits, annoyed Nero: he had the whistlers strangled in the corridors, and no one whistled any more. But it was not enough for Nero,—that hankerer after the impossible, as Tacitus called him,—it was not enough that no one whistled any more, he wanted everybody to applaud him. Now, he could indeed strangle those who whistled, but he could not exactly strangle those who did not applaud; he would have had to strangle the whole audience, and that would have been no light job: Roman theatres held twenty, thirty, forty thousand spectators!... As they were so strong in numbers, they could easily have prevented themselves from being strangled. Nero went one better: he instituted a body composed of Roman nobles—a kind of confraternity consisting of some three thousand members. These three thousand chevaliers were not the emperor's pretorians, they were the artist's body-guard; wherever he went, they followed him; whenever he sang, they applauded him. Did a surly spectator raise a murmur, a sensitive ear allow its owner to utter a slight whistle, that murmur or whistle was immediately drowned by applause. Nero ruled triumphant in the theatre. Had not Sylla, Cæsar and Pompey exhausted all other kinds of triumph? Well, my dear sir, that race of chevaliers has been perpetuated under the name of claqueurs. The Opéra has them, the Théâtre-Français has them, the Odéon has them—and is fortunate in having them!—finally, the Porte-Saint-Martin has them; nowadays their mission is not only to support poor actors—it consists even more, as you have just seen, in preventing bad plays from collapsing. They are called romains, from their origin; but our romains are not recruited from among the nobility. No, managers are not so hard to please in their choice, and it is not necessary to show a gold ring on the first finger; provided they can show a couple of big hands, and bring these large hands rapidly and noisily together, that is the only quartering of nobility required of them. So, you see, I am quite right to warn you not to upset two of your friends for one of those rapscallions.... Now that I have enlightened you, will you allow me to leave?"
I knew it would be impertinent to retain my neighbour any longer. Though his conversation, which had covered a wide range of subjects in a short time, was agreeable and highly edifying to myself, it was evident he could not say the same of mine. I could not teach him anything, save that I was ignorant of everything he knew. So I effaced myself with a sigh, not daring to ask him who he was, and allowing him to pass by with his Pastissier françois hugged with both hands to his breast, fearing, no doubt, lest one of the chevaliers of whom he had just spoken, curious in the matter of rare books, should relieve him of it.
I watched him withdraw with regret: a vague presentiment told me that, after having done me so much service, this man would become one of my closest friends. In the meanwhile, he had made the intervals far more interesting than the play.
Happily the bell was ringing for the third act, and so the intervals were at an end.
[CHAPTER XI]
A parenthesis—Hariadan Barberousse at Villers-Cotterets—I play the rôle of Don Ramire as an amateur—My costume—The third act of the Vampire—My friend the bibliomaniac whistles at the most critical moment—He is expelled from the theatre—Madame Allan-Dorval—Her family and her childhood—Philippe—His death and his funeral
The only definite feeling I was conscious of, when my neighbour had gone, was one of utter loneliness in that vast building. So I gave my whole attention to the play. Could I judge clearly? No, certainly not as yet: the Vampire was one of the first melodramas I had come across. The first was Hariadan Barberousse. I have forgotten to tell at the proper time and place how I became acquainted with the work of MM. Saint-Victor and Corse.