"M. Lafond, why do you play Zamore in such a shabby girdle? Your feathers look like fish-bones; they are positively indecent!"
"Young man," replied Lafond, "Zamore is not rich; Zamore is a slave; Zamore could not afford to buy himself a new girdle every day; I am true to history."
What was perhaps less true to history was the expansive Stomach which the girdle enclosed.
Lafond's triumphs in these cavalier parts made Talma nearly die of envy. One day Geoffroy's articles exasperated him to such a degree that, on meeting the critic in the wings, he flew at him and bit him—at the risk of poisoning himself. But as the law of universal stability decrees that every bullet shall find its billet, the populace, by degrees, grew tired of Lafond's redundant declamation and emphatic gestures, which, at the time of which we are speaking, being used only by a few old-fashioned members of the school of Larive, drew receipts no longer, even when they played the parts of chevaliers français.
Lafond was an odd fellow in other ways besides. Thanks to his Gascon accent and to his way of saying things, one never knew whether he were talking nonsense or saying something witty.
He once came into the lounge of the Théâtre-Français when Colson (an indifferent actor who was often hissed) was blurting out his caricature of Lafond's trick of over-acting. Colson pulled himself up; but it was too late: Lafond had heard his voice in the corridor. He made straight for Colson.
"Eh! Colson, my friend," he said, in that Bordelais accent of which none but those who have heard and followed it could form any idea, "they tell me you have been taking me off?"
"Oh! M. Lafond," Colson replied, trying to recover himself, "take you off?... No, I swear I...."
"All right! all right! that was what I was told.... Come, Colson, do me a favour."