This seemed quite natural and reasonable to Jean, and Diane, laughing, but wholly in earnest, promised him an engagement to sing with her.
“For you know, Jean, you would have been just as high up as I am, except that I had more impudence. Now that you have had your tea, come into the drawing-room and let us sing together some of the old songs and do some of the old tricks. I have a companion who can thump the piano a little for us.”
Diane ran into the drawing-room, called for her companion, a decorous and withered person, Madame Dupin, who sat down to the piano and managed the accompaniment while Diane and Jean sang some of the old songs together with immense spirit. Then Diane proposed to do their singing act together, which meant a love scene and a quarrel that had always brought down the house in the cheap music-hall in Bienville. Jean remembered it well enough—only too well. The memory of the pangs he suffered when Diane, after she met the Marquis, would hold away from him and would not throw herself into his arms as a real actress should, was vivid and painful. But in the pretty drawing-room with Madame Dupin playing away at the piano, Diane hurled herself into Jean’s arms and acted as if inspired. When the quarrel came, it was acted so naturally that Diane’s man-servant, who was peeping through the door, suddenly rushed in and, seizing Jean by the collar, shouted:
“I will report you to the police for abusing and insulting my lady!”
This amused Diane so much that she threw herself on the sofa convulsed with laughter, and Jean laughed as he had not done since he last saw Diane, while the man-servant, when the circumstances were explained, ran away sheepishly, to be the laughing-stock of his fellow-servants.
It was all so merry and free, and like a last look at a happy past, when before one lies victory, but with it, war and guns and wounds and death.
Jean gave himself barely time to hurry back in a cab to his music-hall, while Diane rushed upstairs to make ready for her own performance.
Great as had been Diane’s fame before, it grew greater in those days when France marched forth to conquer Europe again, and was smitten on every hand.
In August and September, when disaster followed disaster, and the universe seemed tumbling to pieces, Diane still sang La Marseillaise every night at the music-hall. It seemed to comfort and put new courage into the hearts of her listeners, mostly striplings and weaklings and old men who could not go to fight the Prussians, and could only hate them from afar. The music-hall did a rushing business; many persons skimped their daily bread to save a couple of francs that would take them into the music-hall where Diane with her glorious singing would reanimate their fainting souls. Not even when the siege began did Diane cease her singing. The prices were then put down, and the hall was not so full, but all came who could.
Jean was gone. He was in the armies that were defeated, or that melted away, or that never existed except on paper. But he was never captured. Two or three times in those frightful months, Diane got a brief line from him. Once he wrote: