"Ah! Madame la Marquise!" exclaimed the dramatist at the word "lamenting," while his face twitched worse than before, since assumed horror was added to it now. "Lamenting; no! no! madame! lament nothing. At least there is, I trust, nothing to lament in our modern drama."
"Ay, but there is though!" the Marquise said. Then assuming an air of playful reproof, she went on: "How is it that you all miss plot in your productions now? Why have you no secrets reserved for the end--for the dénouement, for the last moment ere they make ready to extinguish the lights. Eh! Answer me that. Hardy was the last. Since then it is all pompous declamation, heavy versification, dull pomp, and thunder. Hardy belonged to a past day, but at least he excited his listeners, kept them awake for what was to come--what they knew would come--what they knew must come."
"Madame has said it----" the dramatist bowed at this moment to three ladies of the aristocracy who passed by, while Desparre rose from his seat to greet them with stiff courtesy, and Diane Grignan de Poissy smiled affectionately. "Hardy did belong to a past day. We have changed all that, Corneille changed it." At the name of Corneille he bowed again solemnly. "Yet," he said, "plot is no bad thing. A little vulgar and straining, perhaps, yet sufficiently interesting."
"Monsieur de Crébillon," Desparre exclaimed here, he not having spoken a word before or acknowledged the dramatist's presence, except by a glance, "you may be seated. There is a sufficiency of room upon this bench."
With a gleam from his sunken eyes--which might have meant to testify thanks to Monsieur le Duc, or might have meant to convey contempt--was he not already a popular favourite among the highest ranks of the aristocracy in Paris, and, even here, in Eaux St. Fer, one of those to whom the fashionable side of the alley was thrown open as a right!--he took his seat upon the vacant space on the other side of the Marquise. Then, from out the hollow caverns of his eye-sockets he regarded her steadily, while he said--
"Has Madame la Marquise by chance any protegé among her many friends who has written a play with a plot? An embryo Hardy, for example. Almost, if a poor poet might be permitted to have a thought," and again his glance rested with contempt on Desparre; "I would wager such to be the case. Some gentleman of her house who deems that he has the sacred fire within him----"
"Supposing," interrupted Diane, "that one who is no poor gentleman--but--but--as a matter of fact--myself--had conceived a good drama, a--a--story so strange that she imagined it might amuse--nay--interest an audience. Suppose that! Would it be possible to----?"
"Madame," exclaimed le Duc Desparre, "have you turned dramatist. Are you about to become a bluestocking?"
"Why not?" she asked, with a swift glance that met his; a glance that reminded him--he knew not why--of the blue steely glitter of a rapier. "Why not? Have not other women of France, of my class, done such things?"
"Frequently," de Crébillon replied, answering the question addressed to the other. "Frequently. Yet--yet--never that I can recall in public, before the lower orders, the people. But to pass a soirée away, to amuse one's friends in the country. That would be another thing. A little comedy now,--with a brilliant, startling conclusion--"