“Get up and come to my study,” he said, “I want to talk to you.” He was grave and sad, not angry.
“I have decided, after many sleepless nights, that you shall go back to Paris, but only for a time. If you should fail on further trial, I think you will do me the justice to own that I have done all that can be expected, and will consent to try some other career. You know my opinion of second-rate poets—every sort of mediocrity is contemptible—and it would be a deadly humiliation to feel that you were numbered among the failures of the world.”
Without waiting to hear more, I promised all he wished. “But,” he continued, “since your mother’s point of view is diametrically opposed to mine, I desire, in order to avoid trouble, that you do not mention this, and that you start for Paris secretly.”
But it was impossible to hide this sudden bound from utter despair to delirious joy and Nanci, my sister, with many promises not to tell, wormed my secret out of me. Of course she kept it as well as I did, and by nightfall, everyone, including my mother, knew my plans.
Now it will hardly be believed that there are still people in France who look upon anyone connected with theatres or theatrical art as doomed to everlasting perdition, and since, according to French ideas, music hardly exists outside a theatre, it, too, shares the same fate.
Apropos of this I nearly made Lesueur die of laughing over a reply of one of my aunts.
We were arguing on this very point, and I said at last:
“Come, Auntie, I believe you would object to have even Racine a member of your family!”
“Well, Hector,” she said seriously, “we must be respectable before everything.”
Lesueur insisted that such sentiments could only emanate from an elderly maiden aunt, in spite of my asseverations that she was young and as pretty as a flower.