“One day, just above a month ago, she climbed the miserable staircase to her lover’s lodging; climbed in her glory, dressed like a real countess of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to our friend’s garret. La Palferine, seeing her, said, ‘You have made a peeress of yourself I know. But it is too late, Claudine; every one is talking just now about the Southern Cross, I should like it see it!’
“‘I will get it for you.’
“La Palferine burst into a peal of Homeric laughter.
“‘Most distinctly,’ he returned, ‘I do not wish to have a woman as ignorant as a carp for my mistress, a woman that springs like a flying fish from the green-room of the Opera to Court, for I should like to see you at the Court of the Citizen King.’
“She turned to me.
“‘What is the Southern Cross?’ she asked, in a sad, downcast voice.
“I was struck with admiration for this indomitable love, outdoing the most ingenious marvels of fairy tales in real life—a love that would spring over a precipice to find a roc’s egg, or to gather the singing flower. I explained that the Southern Cross was a nebulous constellation even brighter than the Milky Way, arranged in the form of a cross, and that it could only be seen in southern latitudes.
“‘Very well, Charles, let us go,’ said she.
“La Palferine, ferocious though he was, had tears in his eyes; but what a look there was in Claudine’s face, what a note in her voice! I have seen nothing like the thing that followed, not even in the supreme touch of a great actor’s art; nothing to compare with her movement when she saw the hard eyes softened in tears; Claudine sank upon her knees and kissed La Palferine’s pitiless hand. He raised her with his grand manner, his ‘Rusticoli air,’ as he calls it—‘There, child!’ he said, ‘I will do something for you; I will put you—in my will.’
“Well,” concluded Nathan, “I ask myself sometimes whether du Bruel is really deceived. Truly there is nothing more comic, nothing stranger than the sight of a careless young fellow ruling a married couple, his slightest whims received as law, the weightiest decisions revoked at a word from him. That dinner incident, as you can see, is repeated times without number, it interferes with important matters. Still, but for Claudine’s caprices, du Bruel would be de Cursy still, one vaudevillist among five hundred; whereas he is in the House of Peers.”