“Really! beautiful Queen Anne gives you the impression, also, of a coquettish bird of prey, of a little spitfire of a falcon, whom it is not wise to tease. Ah, well! If you like,” he went on as he got up, “the act is over, I will present you to one or the other of them. It is very funny. Would you believe that in my stories I have always more or less need of a looker-on; when we think that there are people foolish enough to criticize the classic tragedies on this account? In my opinion there is no more natural person.”
He took my arm as he said this, assigning me the part of witness, of satellite borne along in the orbit of its sun. It is a strange thing that I am really made for those secondary parts, Pylades to an Orestes, Horatio to Hamlet; and his coolness did not wound me. Alas! it has been decreed that I should be, like Horatio, always and everywhere an unsuccessful man. What irony to have as my Hamlet the implacable egotist who was showing me the way to little Favier’s dressing-room! I followed him behind the scenes, up a staircase crowded with dressers and supernumeraries, and along corridors full of doors from behind which came the sounds of laughter, singing, argument, and of expressions used at a card-party.
Previously, I had only been behind the scenes at the Comédie Française of the famous theatres; where I often accompanied the unfortunate Claude. At that theatre, was to be found the correct and conventional respectability, which too often spoils the acting of members of the company of that famous house. My horror of pretentiousness has always made me dislike the Comédie, with its elegant appearance, its secular portraits, its venerable busts, and its elegant green room. There, more than elsewhere I have experienced the disenchantment of the contrast between the play and the back of the stage, between theatrical prestige and its kitchen. On the contrary, behind the scenes of the smaller theatres, where my friends have taken me, the Varieties, the Gymnase and the Vaudeville on that evening, I have felt the picturesque antitheses, the supple improvization, the animal energy which constitute an actor’s business. Chance willed that in the company of Jacques Molan, after being a prey to impuissance for the entire day, I should find a complete cure for my vitality. Did we not hear, as we knocked at the door of Mademoiselle Favier’s dressing-room, the following dialogue exchanged by two actors playing the piece, the famous Bressoré, and a gentleman in a frock coat and tall hat, whose clean-shaven face and bluish cheeks showed he was an actor of this or some other company.
“I was not up to much in my new part,” the latter asked, “was I? Tell me the truth.”
“You were very good,” Bressoré replied, “but you have one failing.”
“What is that?”
“You don’t stand firm and look the audience straight in the face.”
“That fellow has just mentioned the secret of success in the arts,” Jacques Molan said to me with a laugh; “between ourselves as friends, you are a little lacking in assurance yourself. If I met you more often I would give you——”
In saying this he did not suspect how gaily and hardly he was touching a sore in my artistic conscience; and I did not give him the answer which rose to my lips. “That simply proves the baseness and brutality of success, and that the artist who succeeds is often a charlatan in disguise.”
He had just knocked at the dressing-room door. A voice had answered, “Who is there?” then without waiting for a reply the door opened and Camille Favier appeared with a smile of happiness upon her pretty face which changed into a constrained expression when she saw that her lover was not alone.