“Every honour shall be shown to the author!”
Then followed a few moments of general disturbance of couches and chairs, the occupation of the seats by the women, leaving almost all the men to stand, and the gradual establishment of silence. In the midst of the last of the whispering came the sudden sound of the voices of the two performers, the dialogue, and the discreet applause of the audience of people of leisure; but I hardly noticed the details so did my heart beat, and does still to-day, at the recollection of that long-past hour.
Knowing as I did the minutest expressions of Camille’s mobile face, the slightest shades of her gestures, the most tenuous inflections of her voice, I had realized from the first words of the scene that she had lost control of herself. Madam de Bonnivet had seen it too. She affected, while bowing her head at the fine points and being the first to applaud, to lean towards Jacques a little too far, to speak to him in low tones, and render him that public homage which was the simple politeness of an admirer of the fashionable author! But to Camille, the wronged and desperate mistress, the insolence of this attitude was too atrocious, and it was impossible for the actress to bear it without taking her revenge. I believed at first that she would try to humiliate her formidable rival by her success, so much eloquence and passion did she display in the short scene she was acting.
After that was ended, when she was asked to recite one or two pieces, I thought she would restrict her vengeance to sharing a little of her success with two of Jacques’ colleagues, of whom he is jealous, unless she chose these two poems because in reciting them she was also solacing her own poor deserted heart. One of these poems was by René Vincy, and the other was an unpublished sonnet by Claude Larcher which I had copied for her. Dear Claude! How beautiful Camille was while she recited this elegy which had for me so many moving souvenirs of my dead friend’s sorrow. She recited one or two other pieces, and then quickly and in a joking way which reassured me for a second, she began to give those imitations which are always ignoble and sometimes vulgar. The divine Julia Bartet, the suffering and finely vibrating Tanagra in Antigone, the supple and poignant Réjane in Germinie Lacerteux, the pathetic Jane Hading in Sapho, the sprightly Jeanne Granier and the tragic Marthe Brandés were in turn the pretext for a mimicry which testified to a study of the art of these famous artists so profound as to be almost a science, and to that monkeyish frolic of which Molan had spoken, till having announced Sarah Bernhardt in Phédre, a shiver went through my whole frame.
She began and I suddenly recalled Adrienne Lecouvreur and the scene in which the actress, seeing Maurice de Saxe, whom she loved, flirting with the Duchess de Bouillon during a drawing-room performance, recited those same lines of Racine’s and ended by applying to her in a loud voice the imprecation of the poet’s incestuous queen. Had Camille, an actress like Adrienne, in love, too, like her, like her betrayed under circumstances which I suddenly realized were very similar, coolly premeditated the same vengeance? Or did the excess of her anger inspire her all at once with this manner of outraging her unworthy lover and his mistress? I could distinctly see now upon her face a terrible intention, and I listened to her with my eyes fixed upon Jacques as she uttered that admirable line—
“The heart is full of sighs it has not uttered.”
But her overpowering emotion already prevented from imitating the accent of the admirable Sarah. She pronounced in her own way and on her own behalf the poet’s lines, and advanced to the edge of the little stage with the denunciatory gesture which is in Adrienne Lecouvreur. Her arms were pointed towards Madam de Bonnivet. She darted at her enemy a look of mad jealousy as she uttered the irreparable words—
“I know my wickedness Œnone, and am not one of those bold women who, enjoying in crime a shameful peace, have learned to keep an unblushing face.”