And save those of the theatres, of the Conservatoire, and of the public librairie, he crossed no threshold save his own.
'If I had only been a grocer,' he used to say with his mellow laugh, 'a good plump grocer, as my poor father wished, who knows? I might have even been mayor of my native town by this, and had a son a vice-préfet!'
He was a man now nigh on eighty years, erect, vivacious, combating age with all the eternal youthfulness of genius, his black eyes had still a flash of those fires which had once scorched up the souls of women, and his handsome mouth had still the smile of fine irony which had adorned and accentuated his Alceste and his Mascarille. He dwelt alone with a servant nearly as old as himself; he had a great natural contempt for all domestic ties.
'Had I become a grocer I would have married,' he was wont to say. 'If you are in trade, respectability is as necessary to you as dishonesty; but to the artist the nightcap of marriage is like the biretta which they draw over a man's head in Spain before they garotte him. When once you put it on, adieu les rêves!'
And in his celibate old age, if he had no longer dreams, he had recollections and interests which kept him mentally young. His Paris was his one mistress, of whom he never tired.
He had left the stage five-and-twenty years and more, in his own person, but he still took the keenest interest, possessed the highest influence, in all higher dramatic art and life. The silence of David Rosselin on a first night condemned a play as an irrevocable failure, whilst his smile of approval was assurance to an author that he had successfully empoigné his public. He was the most accurate of judges, the most penetrating of critics; he would occasionally make little epigrammatic speeches which remained like little barbed steel darts, but he was indulgent to youth and encouraging to modesty. When Rosselin said that a pupil of the Conservatoire had a future, the future, when it became the present, never belied his judgment. For the rest, he was in a small way a bibliophile, delighted in rare copies and delicate bindings, and was an unerring authority on all centuries of costume and custom.
'Incessantly acting all your life, when did you find all the time to acquire so much knowledge?' Paul Jacob had said once to him.
David Rosselin had replied with his genial laugh:
'Ah, mon cher, I have had all the time that I should have spent in quarrelling with my wife if I had had one!'