“She is.”
“In the first and third acts of the play she wears a gold bracelet set with large green stones.”
“I noticed it the other night. I had a seat in the parterre, I may say.”
“I want that bracelet,” broke in the soi-disant Jean Duval unceremoniously. “The stones are false, the gold strass. I admire Mlle. Mars immensely. I dislike seeing her wearing false jewellery. I wish to have the bracelet copied in real stones, and to present it to her as a surprise on the occasion of the twenty-fifth performance of Le Rêve. It will cost me a king’s ransom, and her, for the time being, an infinite amount of anxiety. She sets great store by the valueless trinket solely because of the merit of its design, and I want its disappearance to have every semblance of a theft. All the greater will be the lovely creature’s pleasure when, at my hands, she will receive an infinitely precious jewel the exact counterpart in all save its intrinsic value of the trifle which she had thought lost.”
It all sounded deliciously romantic. A flavour of the past century—before the endless war and abysmal poverty had killed all chivalry in us—clung to this proposed transaction. There was nothing of the roturier, nothing of a Jean Duval, in this polished man of the world who had thought out this subtle scheme for ingratiating himself in the eyes of his lady fair.
I murmured an appropriate phrase, placing my services entirely at M. le Marquis’s disposal, and once more he broke in on my polished diction with that brusquerie which betrayed the man accustomed to be silently obeyed.
“Mlle. Mars wears the bracelet,” he said, “during the third act of Le Rêve. At the end of the act she enters her dressing-room, and her maid helps her to change her dress. During this entr’acte Mademoiselle with her own hands puts by all the jewellery which she has to wear during the more gorgeous scenes of the play. In the last act—the finale of the tragedy—she appears in a plain stuff gown, whilst all her jewellery reposes in the small iron safe in her dressing-room. It is while Mademoiselle is on the stage during the last act that I want you to enter her dressing-room and to extract the bracelet out of the safe for me.”
“I, M. le Marquis?” I stammered. “I, to steal a—”
“Firstly, M.—er—er—Ratichon, or whatever your confounded name may be,” interposed my client with inimitable hauteur, “understand that my name is Jean Duval, and if you forget this again I shall be under the necessity of laying my cane across your shoulders and incidentally to take my business elsewhere. Secondly, let me tell you that your affectations of outraged probity are lost on me, seeing that I know all about the stolen treaty which—”
“Enough, M. Jean Duval,” I said with a dignity equal, if not greater, than his own; “do not, I pray you, misunderstand me. I am ready to do you service. But if you will deign to explain how I am to break open an iron safe inside a crowded building and extract therefrom a trinket, without being caught in the act and locked up for house-breaking and theft, I shall be eternally your debtor.”