“That rat, who is just leaving a rehearsal at the Opera-house, is going home to eat a miserable dinner, and will return about three o’clock to dress, if she dances in the ballet this evening—as she will, to-day being Monday. This rat is already an old rat for she is thirteen years of age. Two years from now that creature may be worth sixty thousand francs; she will be all or nothing, a great danseuse or a marcheuse, a celebrated person or a vulgar courtesan. She has worked hard since she was eight years old. Such as you see her, she is worn out with fatigue; she exhausted her body this morning in the dancing-class, she is just leaving a rehearsal where the evolutions are as complicated as a Chinese puzzle; and she’ll go through them again to-night. The rat is one of the primary elements of the Opera; she is to the leading danseuse what a junior clerk is to a notary. The rat is—hope.”
“Who produces the rat?” asked Gazonal.
“Porters, paupers, actors, dancers,” replied Bixiou. “Only the lowest depths of poverty could force a child to subject her feet and joints to positive torture, to keep herself virtuous out of mere speculation until she is eighteen years of age, and to live with some horrible old crone like a beautiful plant in a dressing of manure. You shall see now a procession defiling before you, one after the other, of men of talent, little and great, artists in seed or flower, who are raising to the glory of France that every-day monument called the Opera, an assemblage of forces, wills, and forms of genius, nowhere collected as in Paris.
“I have already seen the Opera,” said Gazonal, with a self-sufficient air.
“Yes, from a three-francs-sixty-sous seat among the gods,” replied the landscape painter; “just as you have seen Paris in the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, without knowing anything about it. What did they give at the Opera when you were there?”
“Guillaume Tell.”
“Well,” said Leon, “Matilde’s grand DUO must have delighted you. What do you suppose that charming singer did when she left the stage?”
“She—well, what?”
“She ate two bloody mutton-chops which her servant had ready for her.”
“Pooh! nonsense!”