The papers were talking a great deal that winter about this Alice Bachellery, whom a fashionable impresario had discovered in a small theatre in the provinces, whom all the world was crowding to hear when she sang the “Little Baker’s Boy,” the chorus to which—
“Hot, hot, little oat-cakes”—
she gave with an irresistible drollery. She was one of those divas half a dozen of whom the boulevard devours each season, paper reputations inflated by gas and puffery, which make one think of the little rose-colored balloons that live their single day of sunshine and dust in the public gardens. And what think you she had come to ask for at the Minister’s? Permission to appear on the programme at his first concert! Little Bachellery and the Department of Public Instruction! It was so amusing and so crazy that Numa wanted to hear her ask it himself; so by a Ministerial letter that smelt of the leather and gloves of the orderly who took it he gave her to understand that he would receive her next day. But the next day Mlle. Bachellery did not appear.
“She must have changed her mind,” said Lappara, “she is such a child!”
But Roumestan felt piqued, did not mention the subject for two days and on the third sent for her.
And now she was awaiting him in the great drawing-room for official functions, all in gold and red, so imposing with its long windows opening into the garden now bereft of flowers, its Gobelin tapestries and its marble statue of Molière sitting in a dreamy posture in the background. A grand piano, a few music-stands used at the rehearsal, scarcely filled one corner of the big room whose dreary air, like an empty museum, would have disconcerted any one but little Bachellery; but then she was such a child!
Tempted by the broad floor, all waxed and shiny, here she was, amusing herself by taking slides from one end of the room to the other, wrapped in her furs, her hands in a muff too small for them, her little nose upraised under her jaunty pork-pie hat, looking like one of the dancers of the “ice ballet” in The Prophet. Roumestan caught her at the game.
“Oh! Your Excellency!”
She was dreadfully embarrassed, her eyelashes quivering, all out of breath. He had come in with his head up and a solemn step in order to give some point to a somewhat irregular interview and put this impertinent huzzy, who had kept Ministers waiting, in her proper place. But the sight of her quite disarmed him. What could you expect?
She laid her simple ambition so cleverly before him as an idea that had come to her suddenly, to appear at the concerts which every one was talking about so much—it would be of so much advantage to her to be heard otherwise than in comic opera and music hall extravaganzas, which bored her to death! But then, on reflection, a panic had seized her: “Oh, I tell you, a regular panic! Wasn’t it, Mamma?”