In old Albert Bassompierre’s days the players had confined themselves to the legitimate drama; Edouard had found it more profitable to tour a variety show interspersed with one-act farces and melodrama. Sylvia’s favorites in the company were Madame Perron, the wife of the chanteur grivois, and Blanche, a tall, fair, noisy girl who called herself a diseuse, but who usually sang indecent ballads in a powerful contralto. Madame Perron was Sylvia’s first attraction, because she had a large collection of dolls with which she really enjoyed playing. She was a femme très-propre, and never went farther with any of her admirers in the audience than to exact from him the gift of a doll.
“Voilà ses amours manqués,” her husband used to say with a laugh.
In the end Sylvia found her rather dull, and preferred to go tearing about the country with Blanche, who, though she had been a scullery-maid in a Boulogne hotel only a year ago, had managed during her short career on the stage to collect more lovers than Madame Perron had collected dolls. She had a passion for driving. Sylvia could always be sure that on the morning after their opening performance in any town a wagonette or dog-cart would be waiting to take them to some neighboring village, where a jolly party would make a tremendous noise, scandalize the inhabitants, and depart, leaving a legacy of unpopularity in the district for whichever of Blanche’s lovers had paid for the entertainment with his purse and his reputation. Once they arrived at a village where a charity bazaar was being held under the direction of the curé. Blanche was presented to him as a distinguished actress from Paris who was seeking peace and recreation in the depths of the country. The curé asked if it would be presuming too far on her good nature to give them a taste of her art in the cause of holy charity, a speech perhaps from Corneill or Racine. Blanche assented immediately and recited a piece stuffed so full of spicy argot that the rustic gentility understood very little of it, though enough to make them blush—all except the priest, that is, who was very deaf and asked Blanche, when she had finished, if it were not a speech from Phèdre she had declaimed, thanking her very earnestly for the pleasure she had given his simple parish folk, a pleasure, alas, which he regretted he had not been able to enjoy as much as he should have enjoyed it before he became deaf.
On another occasion they drove to see the ruins of an ancient castle in Brittany, and afterward went down into the village to drink wine in the garden of the inn, where an English family was sitting at afternoon tea. Sylvia stared curiously at the two little girls who obeyed their governess so promptly and ate their cakes so mincingly. They were the first English girls she had ever seen, and she would very much have liked to tell them that her father was English, for they seemed to want cheering up, so solemn were their light-blue eyes and so high their boots. Sylvia whispered to Blanche that they were English, who replied that so much was very obvious, and urged Sylvia to address them in their native tongue; it would give them much pleasure, she thought. Sylvia, however, was too shy, so Blanche in her loudest voice suddenly shouted:
“Oh yes! T’ank you! I love you! All right! You sleep with me? Goddambleudi!”
The English family looked very much shocked, but the governess came to their rescue by asking in a thin throaty voice for the “attition,” and presently they all walked out of the garden. Blanche judged the English to be a dull race, and, mounting on a table, began a rowdy dance. It happened that, just when the table cracked, the English governess came back for an umbrella she had left behind, and that Blanche, leaping wildly to save herself from falling, leaped on the governess and brought her to the ground in a general ruin of chairs and tables. Blanche picked up the victim and said that it was all very rigolo, which left miss as wise as she was before, her French not extending beyond the tea-table and the chaster portions of a bedroom. Blanche told Sylvia to explain to miss that she had displayed nothing more in her fall than had given much pleasure to all the world. Sylvia, who really felt the poor governess required such practical consolation, translated accordingly, whereat miss became very red and, snatching her umbrella, walked away muttering, “Impertinent little gipsy.” When Blanche was told the substance of her last remark, she exclaimed, indignantly:
“Elles sont des vrais types, vous savez, ces gonzesses. Mince, alors! Pourquoi s’emballer comme ça? Elle portait un pantalon fermé! Quelle race infecte, ces Anglais! Moi, je ne peux pas les suffrir.”
Sylvia, listening to Blanche’s tirade, wondered if all the English were like that. She thought of her father’s books, and decided that life in France must have changed him somehow. Then she called to mind with a shiver the solemn light-blue eyes of the little girls. England must be a cold sort of a place where nobody ever laughed; perhaps that was why her father had come away. Sylvia decided to remain in France, always in a caravan if possible, where no English miss could poke about with bony fingers in one’s bread and butter.
Sylvia acquired a good deal of worldly wisdom from being so continuously in the society of Blanche, and for a child of eleven she was growing up somewhat rapidly. Yet it would have been hard to say that the influence of her noisy friend was hurtful, for it never roused in Sylvia a single morbid thought. Life in those days presented itself to her mostly as an amusing game, a game that sometimes caused tears, but tears that were easily dried, because, after all, it was only a game. Such was the situation created on one occasion by the unexpected arrival of Blanche’s fiancé from his regiment, the 717th of the line.
The company was playing at St.-Nazaire at the time, and Louis Moreau telegraphed from Nantes that he had been granted a congé of forty-eight hours.