“After dinner I will go of my own will.”
“I recommend you to go.”
We dined: I did not lose a single toothful. After eating well and drinking amply, for after all Messer Gaster is a person with whom I have never sulked, I made up my mind what to do, and I prepared to go; I had pledged my word in presence of so many people that I was bound to keep it. For a considerable time I hunted up and down the room for my hat and cane in every corner where they were not likely to be, reckoning all the time that the master of the house would break out into a new torrent of injuries, that somebody would interpose, and that we should at last make friends by sheer dint of altercation. I turned on this side and that, for I had nothing on my heart; but the master, more sombre and dark-browed than Homer’s Apollo as he lets his arrows fly among the Greeks, with his cap plucked farther over his head than usual, marched backwards and forwards up and down the room. Mademoiselle approaches me: “But, mademoiselle,” say I, “what has happened beyond what happens every day? Have I been different from what I am on other days?”
“I insist on his leaving the house.”—“I am leaving.... But I have given no ground of offence.”—“Pardon me; we invite the abbé and....” It was he who was wrong to invite the abbé, while at the same time he was receiving me, and with me so many other creatures of my sort.—“Come, friend Rameau, you must beg the abbé’s pardon.”—“I shall not know what to do with his pardon.”—“Come, come, all will be right.”—They take me by the hand, and drag me towards the abbé’s chair; I look at him with a kind of admiring wonder, for who before ever asked pardon of the abbé? “All this is very absurd, abbé; confess, is it not?” And then I laugh, and the abbé laughs too. So that is my forgiveness on that side; but I had next to approach the other, and that was a very different thing. I forget exactly how it was that I framed my apology.—“Sir, here is the madman....”—“He has made me suffer too long; I wish to hear no more about him.”—“He is sorry.”—“Yes, I am very sorry.”—“It shall not happen again.”—“Until the first rascal....”—I do not know whether he was in one of those days of ill-humour when mademoiselle herself dreads to go near him, or whether he misunderstood what I said, or whether I said something wrong: things were worse than before. Good heavens, does he not know me? Does he not know that I am like children, and that there are some circumstances in which I let anything and everything escape me? And then, God help me, am I not to have a moment of relief? Why, it would wear out a puppet made of steel, to keep pulling the string from night to morning, and from morning to night! I must amuse them, of course, that is the condition; but I must now and then amuse myself. In the midst of these distractions there came into my head a fatal idea, an idea that gave me confidence, that inspired me with pride and insolence: it was that they could not do without me, and that I was indispensable.
I.—Yes, I daresay that you are very useful to them, but that they are still more useful to you. You will not find as good a house every day; but they, for one madman who falls short, will find a hundred to take his place.
He.—A hundred madmen like me, sir philosopher; they are not so common, I can tell you! Flat fools—yes. People are harder to please in folly than in talent or virtue. I am a rarity in my own kind, a great rarity. Now that they have me no longer, what are they doing? They find time as heavy as if they were dogs. I am an inexhaustible bagful of impertinences. Every minute I had some fantastic notion that made them laugh till they cried; I was a whole Bedlam in myself.
I.—Well, at any rate you had bed and board, coat and breeches, shoes, and a pistole a month.
He.—That is the profit side of the account; you say not a word of the cost of it all. First, if there was a whisper of a new piece (no matter how bad the weather), one had to ransack all the garrets in Paris, until one had found the author; then to get a reading of the play, and adroitly to insinuate that there was a part in it which would be rendered in a superior manner by a certain person of my acquaintance.—“And by whom, if you please?”—“By whom? a pretty question! There are graces, finesse, elegance.”—“Ah, you mean Mademoiselle Dangeville? Perhaps you know her?”—“Yes, a little; but ’tis not she.”—“Who is it, then?”—I whispered the name very low. “She?”—“Yes, she,” I repeated with some shame, for sometimes I do feel a touch of shame; and at this name you should have seen how long the poet’s face grew, if indeed he did not burst out laughing in my face. Still, whether he would or not, I was bound to take my man to dine; and he, being naturally afraid of pledging himself, drew back, and tried to say “No, thank you.” You should have seen how I was treated, if I did not succeed in my negotiation! I was a blockhead, a fool, a rascal; I was not good for a single thing; I was not worth the glass of water which they gave me to drink. It was still worse at their performance, when I had to go intrepidly amid the cries of a public that has a good judgment of its own, whatever may be said about it, and make my solitary clap of the hand audible, draw every eye to me, and sometimes save the actress from hisses, and hear people murmur around me—“He is one of the valets in disguise belonging to the man who.... Will that knave be quiet?” They do not know what brings a man to that; they think it is stupidity, but there is one motive that excuses anything.
I.—Even the infraction of the civil laws.
He.—At length, however, I became known, and people used to say: “Oh, it is Rameau!” My resource was to throw out some words of irony to save my solitary applause from ridicule, by making them interpret it in an opposite sense.