The weather was fine. Behind the hearse the mourners were conversing in familiar fashion.
"The cemetery is the devil of a way!"
"Montparnasse? Half an hour at the outside."
"Do you know Nanteuil is engaged at the Comédie-Française?"
"Do we rehearse to-day?" Constantin Marc inquired of Romilly.
"To be sure we do, at three o'clock, in the green-room. We shall rehearse till five. I am playing to-night; I am playing to-morrow; on Sunday I play both afternoon and evening. Work is never over for us actors; one is always beginning over again, always putting one's shoulder to the wheel."
Adolphe Meunier, the poet, laying his hand on his shoulder said:
"Everything going well, Romilly?"
"How are you getting on yourself, Meunier? Always rolling the rock of Sisyphus. That would be nothing, but success does not depend on us alone. If the play is bad and falls flat, all that we have put into it, our work, our talent, a bit of our own life, collapses with it. And the number of 'frosts' I've seen! How often the play has fallen under me like an old hack, and has chucked me into the gutter! Ah, if one were punished only for one's own sins!"