At the end of the second act, after the people had shouted themselves hoarse with delight, I asked to be shown to Madame Lecouvreur’s dressing room—for she was no longer able to go to the foyer during the interval between the acts, so a snuffy old box keeper told me. I knocked at her door and she bade me enter.
She lay on a couch, and was panting with fatigue. The paint on her face made her look ghastly at close range. By her sat Monsieur Voltaire; and I will say that I felt a softening of the heart toward him at that moment which I had never known before. Those fiery eyes of his were full of tenderness and soft pity; he had left his fine friends for Mademoiselle Lecouvreur, and sat by her, fanning her. And when he spoke to her his voice had more of the human in it than one could have thought.
“Come, come, Mademoiselle,” he was saying, “you 180 must not imagine yourself ill. If you do, what will become of me? Who will make the world believe I can write plays, if Adrienne can no longer act them?”
A mournful little smile came upon Mademoiselle Lecouvreur’s reddened lips, and she answered:
“You do not need me, Monsieur, to prove that you can write comedies or tragedies or anything else. All the muses adopted you at your birth, and if ever Adrienne Lecouvreur is remembered it will be because she was chosen by you sometimes to play the immortal parts you created.”
There was not one word of flattery in this, I knew; each uttered the eternal verities.
Then I appeared.
When Mademoiselle Lecouvreur saw me she sprang up with a miraculous strength—she knew that I was the avant-courier of Maurice of Saxe. I had no mind to deliver my master’s message in Monsieur Voltaire’s ears, but he knew what my coming meant, and scowled at me. He was furiously jealous of my master with Mademoiselle Lecouvreur.
I thanked Mademoiselle Lecouvreur for her kind greeting; her poor hands trembled so when she took the note my master had sent that she dropped it. Monsieur Voltaire handed it to her, and saw plainly the awkward writing in it—for I make no pretense that Count Saxe could have earned his living as a writing master. But although Voltaire must have guessed it all, he forbore to gibe at the letter. Love and pity had made him almost human.
There was, however, no room for him or me either in the room then. Mademoiselle Lecouvreur longed 181 to be alone with her treasure of a few scrawled lines, and both of us went out. The door passed, we were in the foyer. That door shut out our truce, and Monsieur Voltaire, in the presence of a number of persons, undertook to make me his butt on Count Saxe’s account.