One day I saw the door of my humble office open and M. Lafond was announced. I raised my head, greatly surprised, unable to imagine why I should be favoured by a visit from the viceroy of the tragic stage: it was indeed he! I offered him a chair; but he refused it with a nod of the head, and stopping close to the door, with his right foot forward and his left hand resting on his hips, he said, "Monsieur Dumas, do you happen to have, by any chance, in your play, a well-set-up gallant who would say to that queer queen Christine, 'Madame, your majesty has no right to kill that poor devil of a Monaldeschi, for this, that, or any other reason'?"
"No, monsieur, no! I have no such gallant in my play."
"You are quite sure you haven't?"
"Yes."
"In that case I have nothing to say to you.... Good-day, M. Dumas." And, turning on his heel, he went out as he had entered. He had come to ask me for the part of this well-set-up gallant, as he called it. Unfortunately, as I had been compelled to acknowledge, I had no such part in my play.
In the heyday of his popularity M. Lafond never spoke of Talma, or of M. Talma: he said, the other person.
The Comte de Lauraguais, who had been Sophie Arnould's lover, and who, like the Marquis de Zimènes, was one of the most constant visitors to the actors' green-room, said one day to M. Lafond, "M. Lafond, I think you are too often the one and not often enough the other?"
Mademoiselle Duchesnois was quite different from Lafond: she was really kind-hearted, and her great successes never made her vain. She was born in 1777, one year before Mademoiselle Mars, at Saint-Saulve, near Valenciennes, and she changed her name, after her début in Phèdre, in 1802, from Joséphine Ruffin to Duchesnois. We have said that she was Mile. Georges' rival in everything: her rival on the stage, her rival in love. Harel was the handsome Paris who was the object of this rivalry. Harel, who was in turn manager of the theatre de l'Odéon and of the théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin, will play a great part in these Memoirs—the part that a clever man, be it known, has the right to play everywhere.
Mademoiselle Duchesnois had had to struggle all her life against her plain looks: she was like one of those china lions one sees on balustrades; she had a particularly big nose which she blew stentoriously, as befitted its size. Lassagne did not dare to go into the orchestra on days when she acted; he was afraid of being blown away. On the other hand, she had a marvellous figure, and her body could have rivalled that of the Venus de Milo. She doted on the part of Alzire, which allowed her and Lafond to appear almost naked. She possessed a certain simplicity of mind which her detractors called stupidity. One day—in 1824—people were busy talking about the inundation of St. Petersburg, and of the various more or less picturesque accidents that had occurred through this inundation.
I was in the wings, behind Talma and Mademoiselle Duchesnois, to whom an actress, who had just arrived from the first, or rather from the second, capital of the Russian Empire, was relating how one of her friends, overtaken by the flood, had only had time to climb up on a crane.