A virtuous play!
The old monkey had realized that the time had come to try that coup, and he tried it. After the first moments of amazement, and a few melancholy ejaculations here and there in the boxes: "Listen! it's in verse!" the audience began to feel the charm of that elevating, healthy work, as if someone had shaken over it, in that rarefied atmosphere, some cool essence, pleasant to inhale, an elixir of life perfumed with the wild thyme of the hillsides.
"Ah! this is fine—it is restful."
That was the general exclamation, a thrill of comfort, a bleat of satisfaction accompanying each line. It was restful to the corpulent Hemerlingue, puffing in his proscenium box on the ground floor, as in a sty of cherry-colored satin. It was restful to tall Suzanne Bloch, in her antique head-dress with crimps peeping out from under a diadem of gold; and Amy Férat beside her, all in white like a bride, sprigs of orange-blossoms in her hair dressed à la chien, it was restful to her, too.
There were numbers of such creatures there, some very stout with an unhealthy stoutness picked up in all sorts of seraglios, triple-chinned and with an idiotic look; others absolutely green despite their rouge, as if they had been dipped in a bath of that arsenite of copper known to commerce as "Paris green," so faded and wrinkled that they kept out of sight in the back of their boxes, letting nothing be seen save a bit of white arm or a still shapely shoulder. Then there were old beaux, limp and stooping, of the type then known as little crevés, with protruding neck and hanging lips, incapable of standing straight, or of uttering a word without a break. And all these people exclaimed as one man: "This is fine—it is restful." Beau Moëssard hummed it like a tune under his little blond moustache, while his queen in a first tier box opposite translated it into her barbarous foreign tongue. Really it was restful to them. But they did not say why they needed rest, from what heart-sickening toil, from what enforced task as idlers and utterly useless creatures.
All these well-disposed murmurs, confused and blended, began to give the theatre the aspect that it wore on great occasions. Success was in the air, faces became brighter, the women seemed embellished by the reflection of the prevailing enthusiasm, of glances as thrilling as applause. André, sitting beside his mother, thrilled with an unfamiliar pleasure, with that proud delight which one feels in stirring the emotions of a crowd, even though it be as a street-singer in the faubourgs, with a patriotic refrain and two tremulous notes in one's voice. Suddenly the whispering redoubled, changed into a tumult. People began to move about and laugh sneeringly. What was happening? Some accident on the stage? André, leaning forward in dismay toward his actors, who were no less surprised than himself, saw that all the opera-glasses were levelled at the large proscenium box, empty until then, which some one had just entered and had taken his seat there, both elbows on the velvet rail, opera-glass in hand, in ominous solitude.
The Nabob had grown twenty years older in ten days. Those impulsive Southern natures, rich as they are in enthusiastic outbursts, in irresistible spurts of flame, collapse more utterly than others. Since his rejection by the Chamber the poor fellow had remained shut up in his own room, with the curtains drawn, refusing to see the daylight or to cross the threshold beyond which life awaited him, engagements he had entered into, promises made, a wilderness of protests and summonses. The Levantine having gone to some watering-place, attended by her masseur and her negresses, absolutely indifferent to the ruin of the family,—Bompain, the man in the fez, aghast amid the constant demands for money, being utterly at a loss to know how to approach his unfortunate employer, who was always in bed and turned his face to the wall as soon as any one mentioned business to him,—the old mother was left alone to struggle with the disaster, with the limited, guileless knowledge of a village widow, who knows what a stamped paper is, and a signature, and who considers honor the most precious possession on earth. Her yellow cap appeared on every floor of the great mansion, overlooking the bills, introducing reforms among the servants, heedless of outcries and humiliations. At every hour in the day the good woman could be seen striding along Place Vendôme, gesticulating, talking to herself, saying aloud: "Bah! I'll go and see the bailiff." And she never consulted her son except when it was indispensable, and then only in a few concise words, careful to avoid looking at him. To arouse Jansoulet from his torpor nothing less would suffice than a despatch from Paul de Géry at Marseille, announcing his arrival with ten millions. Ten millions, that is to say, failure averted, a possibility of standing erect once more, of beginning life anew. And behold our Southerner, rebounding from the depths to which he had fallen, drunk with joy and hope. He ordered the windows to be thrown open, newspapers to be brought. What a magnificent opportunity that first night of Révolte would afford him to show himself to the Parisians, who believed that he had gone under, to re-enter the great eddying whirlpool through the folding doors of his box at the Nouveautés! His mother, warned by an instinctive dread, made a slight effort to hold him back. Paris terrified her now. She would have liked to take her child away to some secluded corner in the South, to care for him with the Elder, both ill with the disease of the great city. But he was the master. It was impossible to resist the will of that man whom wealth had spoiled. She helped him to dress, "made him handsome," as she laughingly said, and watched him not without a certain pride as he left the house, superb, revivified, almost recovered from the terrible prostration of the last few days.
Jansoulet quickly remarked the sensation caused by his presence in the theatre. Being accustomed to such exhibitions of curiosity, he usually responded to them without the least embarrassment, with his kindly, expansive smile; but this time the manifestation was unfriendly, almost insulting.
"What!—is that he?"