“The others,” said François, grinning, “were merely sins against myself. I think I have been remarkably free from injuring other persons.”
The Bishop could not concede this, and delivered a long lecture to François. In return for it, François did some of his best stunts with only the Bishop as audience, and then going to the wheezy old piano played and sang some of the old songs which always made the tears rain upon the Bishop’s gentle face.
On the Thursday night was Diane’s last performance, as it was desired that Mademoiselle Rose should make her début before the Saturday night, when they always had the biggest audience of the week.
No prisoner dressing for the guillotine ever felt more acutely that he was crossing the bridge between two worlds than did Diane on the Thursday night. That night she would dwell for the last time in the world where lovers were always true and the villain was always punished in public. Beyond, in the other world, lay Paradise, but it was unfamiliar. That day she had seen the Marquis for the last time until she and Madame Grandin were to step in the carriage which the Marquis was to send for them on the Saturday morning, and go out to the village near the shooting-box where the wedding was to take place in the village church. Diane had begged the Marquis to remain away from the music hall that night. She said to him in Madame Grandin’s presence:
“If I see you, and even think you are in the audience, I shall break down; I can never go through my part, and I shall be forever disgraced.”
“How ridiculous!” cried the Marquis, laughing. “What difference can it make to you now that you are to become the Marquise Egmont de St. Angel?”
Diane made no reply; she could not make any one understand, who had not lived in the ideal world, what it meant to disgrace one’s self in public by breaking down. Madame Grandin said, however:
“That is true. But how can a marquis understand common people like you and me, Diane?”
Everything was ready; the white muslin, nicely washed and ironed, was in Diane’s chest of drawers. The wedding veil and wreath of orange blossoms, which had cost all of ten francs, lay on top of the wedding gown, carefully wrapped in tissue paper. That wedding veil was floating before Diane’s eyes just as a poor mortal, leaving this world which he loves and all the people in it, sees the silvery cloud that masks the gates of pearl leading to Paradise. All the time, whether on the stage or off, she was saying to herself:
“It is the last time, the last, the last, the last.”