"Silence!" he said, turning swiftly round on her. "Silence! Never mention that name, that episode again in my hearing. It has damned me in the eyes of Paris--of France--for ever. It has heaped ridicule on me from which I can never recover. It is that--that--that--which has broken me down. Neither Tokay, nor late nights--as I cause it to be given out--nor----" He paused in his furious words, then said a moment later, "Yet, so far as he, as she, are concerned, I have paid the score. He is dead, she worse than dead."
"I know, I know," she murmured, her blue eyes almost averted, so that he should not observe the glance that she felt, that she knew, must be in them. "I know. Let us talk of it no more. Armand, forget it."
"Forget it! I shall never forget it. What can I do to drive it from my own thoughts or to drive the memory of my humiliation by that beggar's brat from out the memory of men--of all Paris!"
"Ignore it. Again I say, forget. Thus you cause others to do so." Then, as though she, at least, had no intention of saying aught that might re-open, or help to re-open, the wounds caused to his vanity by the events of the winter, she picked up idly a book he had been glancing at when she drew near him, and which had fallen on to the crushed-shell path of the alley as they conversed. She picked it up and began turning its fresh white pages over.
"It amuses you?" she asked. "This thing?" And she read out the title of one of Piron's latest productions, the comic opera, "Arlequin Deucalion."
"One must do something--to pass the time. If we cannot see a play, the next best thing is to read one."
"Alas," his companion exclaimed, "the plays of to-day are so stupid--so puerile! No plot, no characters bearing truth to life. Now I! Now I--ah!----" she broke off. "Look at that! And just as we speak, too, of plays and playwriters. Behold, Papa de Crébillon. Mon Dieu! What is the matter with him. He jabbers like a monkey. Yet still he bows with grace--the grace of a gentleman."
"He suffers from gout atrociously," Desparre muttered.
In truth, the figure which now approached the pair seated in the alley might have been either of the things which Diane Grignan de Poissy had mentioned, a monkey or a gentleman. His face was a drawn and twitching one, filled with innumerable lines and with, set into it, deep sunken eyes, while his manners were--for the period--perfect, his bow that of a courtier, and worthy of the most refined member of the late Louis' court. For the rest, he was a man of over forty years of age, and was renowned already as the author of the popular dramas "Electra," "Atreus," and "Idomeneus." By his side walked a lad, his son, Claude Prosper, destined to be better known even than his father, though not so creditably.
"Good morning, Monsieur de Crébillon," cried the bright and joyous Diane--bright and joyous as she assumed to be!--while the dramatist drew near to where she and her companion were seated beneath the acacias. "You are most welcome. 'Tis but now we were talking of plays and dramas--lamenting, too----"