No one knows the meaning of pain who has not suffered jealousy. The iron entered into Diane’s soul when she overheard Grandin saying to his wife that the new girl would soon be as good an actress as Diane, and was much handsomer, which was the truth. And everybody was so taken up with rehearsing Mademoiselle Rose; Diane felt herself already thrust out from that ideal world of the stage which to her was the real world. True, the anticipated joy of being married to the man she adored lost none of its delicious charm, its soft seductiveness, but with it was mingled much real suffering, and a strange and awful dislocation of life.
In those three weeks, Diane was so torn by powerful emotions of all sorts, love, pain, grief, jealousy, fear, triumph, and a thousand other minor things, that she neither ate nor slept, and grew even thinner than ever. And Mademoiselle Rose was so fresh and fair! Nevertheless, Diane’s acting did not suffer. On the contrary, like the poor princess who had burning needles in her shoes, Diane was keyed up to do better work than ever in her life. Never had been her comedy so good. Off the stage, she had no more humor than a cat; on the stage, she could throw an audience into spasms of merriment. Her voice, too, had in it a celestial thrill that made her little songs move to laughter or bring to tears as never before.
The Marquis was often at the music hall in those evenings, and Diane unconsciously played directly at him.
Every night, as she made up before her little scrap of a mirror in the canvas den, she would think to herself, as a condemned person thinks of the day of execution:
“There are but ten more nights for me.”
And the next night:
“There are but nine left.”
As to the Marquis’ visits, which Diane rigidly fixed at two a week, and had her own way about it, as she always did, they, like everything else in the extraordinary time, were full of joy and pain. First, was the joy of being with him, of hearing his delightful voice, and seeing him in his beautiful uniform, and the stupendous triumph of it all to her.
At these visits, Madame Grandin, frightened half to death, was always present. Diane invariably rose in a stately manner at the end of half an hour—her book of etiquette prescribed that—and the Marquis, acting just as the book said all fiancés should, complained bitterly of being turned out, and promised reprisals.
It was a strange time to all who were drawn within the whirlpool of emotion that dashed them around in a circle of agitation, stunned and amazed them, made them to be envied and pitied, and in short, as François said, they were exhibited as the puppets of the great God.