He didn’t leave off to eat his breakfast when it came, by-and-by; but ate his rolls and drank his coffee in the pauses of his work, only laying down his brush for a minute or so at a time. The scene was a street in old Paris, the houses very dark and brown, with over-hanging latticed windows, exterior staircases, practicable bridges, and all sorts of devices which called for the employment of a great deal of glue and pasteboard in Richard’s model. This scene was only one out of eight, and the young scene-painter wanted to take perfect models of all the eight scenes back to the Phœnix. He had M. Michel Lévy’s sixty centimes edition of the new play spread open before him, and referred to it now and again as he painted.
“Humph! Enter Raoul down staircase in flat. Raoul’s a doctor, and the house with the staircase is his. The house at the corner belongs to Gobemouche, the comic barber, and the practicable lattice is Madeline’s. She’ll come to her window by-and-by to talk to the doctor, whom she thinks a very excellent man; though he’s been giving her mild doses of aqua tofana for the last three weeks. Catherine de Medicis comes over the practicable bridge, presently, disguised as a nun. I wonder how many melodramas poor Catherine has appeared in since she left this mortal stage? Did she ever do anything except poison people, I wonder, while she was alive? She never does anything else at the Porte Saint Martin, or on the Surrey side of the Thames. I must sketch the costumes, by-and-by. Raoul in black velvet and scarlet hose, a pointed beard, straight eyebrows, short black hair,—austere and dignified. Cromshaw will do Raoul, of course; and Spavin will play the light-comedy soldier who gets drunk, and tears off Catherine’s velvet mask in the last scene. Yes, that’ll be a great scene on our side of the water. Charles the Ninth—he’s a muff, so anybody can play him—has just finished reading the arsenicated edition of a treatise on hawking, closes the last page of the book, feels the first spasm. Catherine, disguised as a nun, has been followed by Spavin—by the comedy-soldier, I mean—to the Louvre, after a conversation having been overheard between her and Raoul. The King, in the agonies of spasmodic affection, asks who has murdered him. ‘That woman—that sorceress—that fiend in human form!’ cries the soldier, snatching the mask from Catherine’s face.—‘Merciful Heaven, it is my mother!’ shrieks the King, falling dead with a final spasm. That ‘It is my mother!’ ought to be good for three rounds of applause at least. I dare say Spavin will have the speech transferred from the King’s part to his own. ‘Merciful Heaven, it is his mother!’ would do just as well.”
Poor Richard Thornton, not having risen very early, worked on till past five o’clock in the afternoon before his model was finished. He got up with a sigh of relief when the pasteboard presentment of the old Parisian street stood out upon the little table, square and perfect.
He filled his pipe and walked up and down before the table, smoking and admiring his work in an innocent rapture.
“Poor Nelly,” he thought presently. “I promised I would call in the Rue de l’Archevêque to-day, to pay my respects to the old chap. Not that he’d particularly care to see me, I dare say, but Nell is such a darling. If she asked me to stand on my head, and do poor old Goffie’s gnome-fly business, I think I should try and do it. However, it is too late to call upon Mr. Vandeleur Vane to-day, so I must put that off till to-morrow. I must drop in again at half-price at the Porte Saint Martin, to have another look at the scene in eight compartments. That’ll be rather a poser for the machinist at the Phœnix, I flatter myself. Yes, I must have one more look at it, and—Ah! by the bye, there’s the Morgue!”
Mr. Thornton finished his pipe and rubbed his chin with a reflective air.
“Yes, I must have a look at the Morgue before I go,” he thought; “I promised that old nuisance, J. T. Jumballs, that I’d refresh my memory about the Morgue. He’s doing a great drama in which one-half of the dramatis personæ recognize the other half dead on the marble slabs. He’s never been across the Channel, and I think his notions of the Morgue are somewhat foggy. He fancies it’s about as big as Westminster Abbey, I know, and he wants the governors to give him the whole depth of the stage for his great scene, and set it obliquely, like the Assyrian hall in ‘Sardanapalus,’ so as to give the idea of illimitable extent. I’m to paint the scene for him. ‘The interior of the Morgue by lamplight. The meeting of the living and the dead.’ That’ll be rather a strong line for the bill, at any rate. I’ll go and have some dinner in the Palais Royal, and then go down and have a look at the gloomy place. An exterior wouldn’t be bad, with Notre Dame in the distance, but an interior—Bah! J. T. J. is a clever fellow, but I wish his genius didn’t lie so much in the charnel-house.”
He put on his hat, left his room, locked the door, and ran down the polished staircase, whistling merrily as he went. He was glad to be released from his work, pleased at the prospect of a few hours’ idleness in the foreign city. Many people, inhabitants and visitors, thought Paris dull, dreary, and deserted in this hot August weather, but it was a delightful change from the Pilasters and the primeval solitudes of Northumberland Square, that quaint, grim quadrangle of big houses, whose prim middle-class inhabitants looked coldly over their smart wire window-blinds at poor Richard’s shabby coat.
Mr. Thornton got an excellent dinner at a great bustling restaurateur’s in the Palais Royal, where for two francs one might dine upon all the delicacies of the season, in a splendid saloon, enlivened by the martial braying of a brass band in the garden below.
The carte de jour almost bewildered Richard by its extent and grandeur, and he chose haphazard from the catalogue of soups which the obliging waiter gabbled over for his instruction. He read all the pleasing by-laws touching the non-division of dinners, and the admissibility of exchanges in the way of a dish for a dessert, or a dessert for a dish, by payment of a few extra centimes. He saw that almost all the diners hid themselves behind great wedges of orange-coloured melon at an early stage of the banquet, and generally wound up with a small white washing-basin of lobster salad, the preparation of which was a matter of slow and solemn care and thought. He ordered his dinner in humble imitation of these accomplished habitués, and got very good value for his two francs. Then he paid his money; bowed to the graceful lady who sat in splendid attire in a very bower of salads and desserts, and went down a broad staircase that led into a street behind the Palais Royal, and thence to the Rue Richelieu.