“She doesn’t go out to supper after the performance. She remains with Monsieur and Madame Grandin, her friends.”
The Marquis howled with laughter at this, and then kept on.
“And she a singer and dancer in the cheapest music hall in this dull old town of Bienville! Oh, she has got it into her silly head that by holding off she can become a marquise, but she won’t.”
“But you are carrying around her note in your breast pocket,” suggested François.
“Oh, yes, I am fool enough for that,” calmly admitted the Marquis, putting the note back in his breast pocket and drawing his chair up to the table. “I can feel it, I can feel it there, although it is only a bit of paper. Who was her father, François?”
“The village hatter,” replied François, “like the father of Adrienne Lecouvreur. That was her prosperous period, when she enjoyed the advantages of a polite education at the village school. Then her parents died, and she was taken to the house of an uncle who owned three acres of ground, and Diane worked in the cabbage garden and tended geese.”
“And where did she learn to sing, and all those devlish, captivating little ways of hers on the stage?”
“From Nature, the mighty mother of us all. She took some singing lessons from the village teacher, and used to sing at country fairs after she was sixteen. Then, a couple of years ago, we found her and took her into our company. Singing on the stage was taught her by Jean Leroux, her partner, and I taught her something of acting and little stage tricks, but I must say she was a very apt pupil. She has got it into her head to go to Paris and study for the grand opera, but she has no grand opera voice, and has two hundred and sixty-six francs to pay her expenses.” For Diane had palmed off the grand opera story on François as well as on Jean, when really her mind was set upon a big music hall.
“Everything that you tell me,” said the Marquis, “shows how admirably unfitted this wide mouthed, skinny girl is to become the Marquise Egmont de St. Angel.”
“You have hit upon her name,” cried François, laughing, “for we call her Skinny. Our little Skinny a marquise! And your title is worth at least two million francs in the open market. As for yourself, I may, with the frankness of a relative, say you would be dear at two hundred francs.”