Every one was approving this opinion, when it occurred to one guest to ask Raymonde, who was seated next him:
“What is your idea, Madame?”
“I hope she is only a monster.”
All the women at the table looked toward me. They visibly pitied me for having cast my lot with a person capable of so narrow and prejudiced an opinion.
And I could not help an irritation at this blame that society put upon me through her.
From seeing her continually rebel against our forms of art and all our prevailing ideas, I became accustomed to thinking her callous. That was indeed the general impression of her. Her reading was too different from that recommended by success to attach any importance to it. At the theatre, nothing, or almost nothing, succeeded in pleasing her. The splendour of an unusual interpretation caused me to take her one evening to see “Polyeucte.” I was not thinking so much of the play itself, as of the actors. Is not that usual? Do not the names of the players, inscribed in letters of fire on the front of our theatres, eclipse those of the authors and even of the play?
In our box, as I called her attention to the acting of the old and eminent actor who played Polyeucte, I was surprised to have no reply. I looked at her more attentively: the tears coursed down her cheeks, though she did not know that she was crying. I had surprised her once before like this in the Coliseum in Rome, when the guide pointed out the gate of the dead. Pauline threw away Severus’s love and her own. Pauline received with open heart the divine spark of the faith. All the pathos of the ardent masterpiece condensed and spiritualised itself on my wife’s face, pale with the force of her emotion.
As the curtain fell, I offered explanations of her exaltation.
“Monroy was sublime,” I said. Had we not come only to see that great actor?
“Which rôle did he play?” she asked. “I didn’t know.”