Cabantous does not appreciate the delicacy of the joke; but he laughs in good humor, his mouth opening back as far as the silver anchors; and, making use of his shoulders, he pushes through the crowd, which falls aside before his wet umbrella, and installs himself on a bench alongside a sufferer who is almost as weather-beaten as himself.
“Té! vé!—why, it is Cabantous. Hello, how are you?”
The pilot begs his pardon—cannot recall who it is.
“Valmajour, you remember; we used to know each other down there in the arena.”
“That is true, by gad.—Bé, my good fellow, you at least can say that Paris has changed you—”
The tabor-player has now become a gentleman with very long black hair pushed behind his ears in the manner of the musical person, and that, along with his swarthy complexion and his blue-black moustache, at which he is constantly pulling, makes him look like one of the gypsies at the Ginger-bread Fair. On top of all this a constant look of the village cock with its crest up, a conceit like that of village beau and musician combined, in which the exaggeration of his Southern origin betrays itself and slops over, notwithstanding his tranquil and ungarrulous appearance.
His lack of success at the opera has not frightened him off; like all actors in such cases he attributes his failure to a cabal, and for his sister and himself that word “cabal” has taken on barbaric and extraordinary proportions, and moreover a Sanscrit spelling—the khabbala—a mysterious monster which combines the traits of the rattlesnake and the pale horse of the Apocalypse.
And so he relates to Cabantous that he is about to appear in a few days at a great variety show in a café on the boulevard—“An eskating-rink I would have you understand!” where he is to figure in some living pictures, at two hundred francs the evening.
“Two hundred francs an evening!” The eyes of the pilot roll in his head.
“And besides that, they will cry my bography in the street and my portrait in life size will be on all the walls of Paris, wid my costume of a troubadour of the old times, which I shall put on every evening when I do my music.”