When social problems became the critic’s copy, Molan once more changed his methods and wrote the novel on a working-class family called Une Épopée de ce temps, a work of imagination in two volumes, of which 65,000 copies were sold. See the vanity of æsthetic theories! All these books were conceived with different principles of art. Through them we could follow the history of the variations of fashion. Not one of them is sincere in the real sense of the word, and all of them have in an equal degree that colour of human truth which seems in this wayward writer an unconscious gift. The same gift he displayed, when fearing to weary his readers by an abuse of the novel, he began to write plays. He wrote Adéle, a great success at the Français; La Vaincue, at the Odéon was another, and the newspapers had informed me of his fresh success at the Vaudeville, with an enigmatically entitled comedy, La Duchesse Blue.
Now the fact that we were at school together proves that this enormous output: ten volumes of fiction, two of short stories, a collection of verses, and three plays was produced in sixteen years. Jacques, too, lived while he worked like this. He had mistresses, made necessary journeys which allowed him to truthfully write in his prefaces sentences like this: “When I picked anemones in the gardens of the Villa Pamphili!” or like this: “I, too, offered up my prayer on the Acropolis”; or again: “Like the bull I saw kneel down to die in the bull ring at Seville.” I have quoted these phrases from memory. Besides all this, the animal looked after his relatives and his investments, and preserved his gaiety and youthful appetite. I had proof of that the evening I mechanically dined with him; in spite of my secret antipathy dominated by the suggestion of vitality emanating from every one of his gestures. We were no sooner seated than he asked me—
“What wine do you prefer, champagne or Burgundy? They are both very good here.”
“I think that Eau de Vals will do for me,” I replied.
“Have you not a good digestion?” he asked with a laugh; “I don’t know that I have a stomach. Then I will have extra dry champagne.” His egoism was of a convenient kind, as he never discussed other people’s caprices, nor allowed them to discuss his. He ordered the dinner and asked me if I had seen his play at the Vaudeville, what I thought of it, and whether it was not the best thing he had done.
“You know,” I replied in some embarrassment, “I hardly ever go to the theatre.”
“What luck!” he went on good-humouredly. “I will take you this evening. I shall find out your first impression of it. Will you be frank with me? You will see that it is not so bitter as Adéle, nor quite so eloquent as La Vaincue. But the way to succeed is to baffle expectations; never, never repeat oneself! Those who reproached me with lack of brain and ignorance of my business, have had to acknowledge their mistake. You know me. I say out loud what I think. When I published Tendres Nuances, last year, you remember what I said to you: 'It is not worth the trouble of reading’; but La Duchesse Blue is different. The public is of the same opinion as myself.”
“But where do you find your titles?” I asked.
“What!” he cried; “you, a painter, ask me that question? Don’t you know Gainsborough’s 'Blue Boy’ in the gallery of Grosvenor House in London? My play has for its heroine a woman whom one of your colleagues, better informed than yourself in English manners, has painted in a harmony of blue tints as the Gainsborough boy. This woman, being a Duchess, has been nicknamed in her set the Little Blue Duchess, because of the portrait. With my dialogue and little Favier!”
“Who is little Favier?” I asked.