'Who is talking of weakness?—I mean that she is not of a temper for the coarse career of the stage, which is always passed in the press and glare of a stormy crowd. She would play Dona Sol divinely to an audience of poets on your terraces at Amyôt under a midsummer moon. But it is unfortunately not a question of playing it so, but on the stages of public theatres, where very often the coarse applause of the friendly ignorant is still more offensive than the envenomed vituperation of the hostile critic. I dare say we can make her fit for this. We can give her the brass disc, but it will spoil the fine white marble when we fasten it to it. My dear Count Othmar, you know what the life of a great actress in Paris is; you know what it will be for her. We need not spend words on details. Is it a good action that we do when we encourage her to qualify herself for it, or is it a bad one?'
Othmar heard him with distress. He was always haunted by the memory that his wife, by a few careless words, had broken up for ever that simple, peaceful, healthful, flower-like life which Damaris Bérarde had led in Bonaventure. The power of all the kings of the earth could not have replaced her in it.
'It is her choice,' he said, after a silence of some moments.
'Is fate ever wholly choice?' said Rosselin. 'And when a child says he will be a soldier, what does he know of war, of wounds, of the sickening stench of the rotting dead, of the maladies which kill men in hundreds like murrained cattle? Nothing: he thinks it all tambour et trompette and Væ Victis! Your friend at Chevreuse knows no more of what the life of the theatre is than the child knows of war, and I for one have not the courage to enlighten her. Have you? She dreams of all kinds of glories; she does not see the rouge-pot, the white powder, the claque, the press, the lovers, the diamonds, the ugliness, the vulgarity, the money bags, the whole ronde du diable. She thinks she will be Dona Sol, be Esther, be Rosalind, off the stage as well as on it. Who is to tell her the mistake she makes?'
'Surely you can, if anyone?'
'No, I cannot. You cannot make a mind conceive a thing wholly inconceivable to it. I can say a certain number of words certainly to her; produce a certain effect; suggest some images to her which will be painful and revolting. But when I have done that I shall not have done much; I shall not have produced any real impression on her, because the advice which I mean will not in itself be intelligible to her. I may talk as I will of war to the child; but I shall never be able to make him see what I have seen in the days of the siege of Paris, which sometimes still turns me sick when I awake at night and think of it. Perhaps it is because I grow old, and, so, sentimental that I am troubled with those scruples which I do not suppose would have suggested themselves to me twenty, or even ten years ago; but I certainly do feel that I have not done what contents me in preparing Damaris Bérarde for the art of the stage. She will be a great artist, I believe, but she will be a miserable woman.'
Othmar heard him with anxiety and pain. The vision of her was always before him as he had left her in the red brown grass with the evening skies behind her. Country peace, woodland silences, fresh air of early autumn, simple pleasures of youth—these would find no place in life into which she had been led to enter. Some, losing them early, long for them all their lives.
'I suppose,' continued Rosselin, 'that the imagination in me is dying out; as one grows old one drops illusions, as old trees drop branch after branch on the ground, till there is nothing left but the trunk, and perhaps a woodpecker in it, perhaps nothing except dust. Certainly twenty years ago I should have said, and should have thoroughly believed, that art—any art—was worth any sacrifice. But now I do not think so. One pays too heavily for any kind of fame. To be famous at all is to have all the doors and windows of your house standing wide open, and a mob, all eyes and ears, for ever staring in and watching you as you eat, as you drink, as you sleep, as you play, aye, even as you weep by your child's coffin or draw the shroud over the breast of your dead mistress. Once famous, you never can laugh or can cry in solitude ever again. Either to throw laurel crowns at you or to pelt you with stones, the mob is always pushing in over your threshold. When boys and girls dream of fame they do not know what it is—the eternal adieu to privacy, the eternal self-surrender to the crowd. Alkibiades loved the crowd; there are many like him in all centuries; but les sensitives hate it, shrink from it, try to bar it out with their bare arm, which gets broken in the struggle, like the Scottish maiden's in history. The price paid is too heavy. All the shade and the freshness and the quiet leafy by-paths of life are denied us for ever. There is only the great high-road, the crude hard light, the gaping multitude that stare and grin till we give up the ghost! The price is too heavy. It is the same curse as the curse which lies on kings, never to be alone.'
He sighed as he turned and walked up the little path of his cottage garden. Looking back upon his life he seemed to have thrown his years to the mob as offal is thrown to a pack of hounds.
It was only a mood, a passing mood, but there was a great truth in it.