The aubade began, rustic and shrill, yet it went forward into the halls hardly farther than the footlights; there it lived a very short life, fighting for a moment with the flamboyant banners on the ceiling and the columns of the enormous interior, and then fell flat into a great and bored silence. The public looked on without the slightest comprehension. Valmajour began another piece, which at the first sounds was received with laughter, murmurs and cat-calls. Audiberte took Hortense’s hand:
“Listen! that’s the cabal!”
At this point the cabal consisted merely of a few “Heh! louder!” and of jokes of this sort, which were called out by a husky voice belonging to some low woman on seeing the complicated dumb-show that Valmajour employed: “Oh, give us a rest, you chump!”
Then the rink took up again its sound of parlor skates and of English billiards and its ambulatory marketing, overwhelming the shepherd’s pipe and the tabor which the musician insisted upon using until the very end of the aubade. After this he saluted again, marched forward toward the footlights, always accompanied by that mysterious grand air which never quitted him. His lips could be seen moving and a few words came here and there into ear-shot: “It came to me all of a sudden ... one hole ... three holes ... the good God’s birrd....”
His despairing gesture was understood by the orchestra and gave the signal for a ballet in which the locusts twined themselves about the odalisques from Caux and formed plastic poses, undulatory and lascivious dances beneath Bengal flames which threw their rainbow light as far as the pointed shoes of the troubadour, who continued his dumb-show with the tabor in front of the castle of his ancestors in a great glory and apotheosis.
There lay the romance of poor little Hortense! That is what Paris had made of it.
The clear bell of the old clock hanging on the wall of her chamber sounded one as Hortense roused herself from the arm-chair into which she had fallen utterly crushed when she entered. She looked around her gentle maiden’s nest, warm with the reassuring gleams of a dying fire and of an expiring night-lamp.
“What am I doing here? Why did I not go to bed?”
She could not remember at first what had happened, only feeling a complete sickness through her entire being and in her head a noise which made it ache. She stood up and walked a step or two before she perceived that she still wore her hat and mantle; then all came back to her. She remembered then their departure after the curtain fell, their return through the hideous market, more brilliantly illumined than before, among drunken book-makers fighting with each other in front of a counter, through cynical voices whispering a sum of money as she passed—and then the scene at the exit, with Audiberte who wished her to come and felicitate her brother; then Audiberte’s wrath in the coach, the abuse which the creature heaped upon her, only ended by Audiberte humiliating herself before her, and kissing her hands for pardon; all that and still other things danced through her memory along with the horrible faces of the clowns, harsh noises of bells, cymbals and rattles, and the rising up of many-colored flames about that ridiculous troubadour to whom she had given her heart! A terror that was physical roused her at that idea: