On the stage one woman came forward and impulsively kissed the bust, and other enthusiasts followed her example.
A stranger, entering at the moment, supposed himself to be in a madhouse.
The curtain fell again; and again rose, this time on “Nanine.” Once more, it was not the play that counted, but the playwright. When the curtain fell for the last time, he made his royal way to his carriage between lines of women sobbing with emotion. Some persons seized his hands and kissed them with tears. Others fell upon the horses to stop them and cried for torches. Thus lighting him, crowds accompanied his carriage home, shouting, dancing, and weeping. When at last he reached the Hôtel Villette, worn out with the glory and the high-pitched emotions of the day, the poor old Patriarch himself wept like a child. “If I had known the people would commit such follies I would never have gone to the Comédie.”
But it was the next morning which, like all next mornings, was the real time for reflection. Here was the man who, more than any other Frenchman who ever lived, understood the national temperament. “Capable of all excesses,” “the Parisians pass their time in hissing and clapping—in putting up statues and pulling them down again.” “You do not know the French,” he said to Genevan Wagnière; “they would have done as much for Jean Jacques.” “They want to stifle me under roses.”
The reflections showed a just judgment. But, coming at such a time, they showed, too, a man old, tired, and at the end of his tether. Tronchin had long said that to survive such a life as he had been living the last few weeks, his body must be made of steel.
Long and bitterly discussed, but this “next morning” become a pressing and imminent question, was the return to Ferney. To go—or to stay? On the one side were Villette and Madame Denis. They were not the rose, but it was delightful to live near the rose. The one, despite the good and pretty wife, had already been drawn back again into the vile dissipations of the capital. The other was not only out at entertainments all day, but at sixty-eight was coyly coquetting with her Duvivier.
In the second camp was Wagnière, who besides having left home, wife, and children at Ferney, was sincerely devoted to his master’s real good; the judicious, clear-seeing d’Alembert, young Dupuits, and above all, Dr. Tronchin. Fearless and upright, the great doctor made one last passionate appeal to his patient to go while there was time. “I would give a hundred louis to see you back at Ferney. Go in a week.”
“Am I fit to travel?” says the poor old Patriarch.
“I will stake my head on it,” says Tronchin.
The thin trembling hand grasped the strong one.