We were having dessert, and he was balancing a piece of pear on the end of his dessert fork as he concluded his confidence with this brutal cruelty which made me say—
“You are between two women again? You are playing a dangerous game.”
“Dangerous?” he interrupted with his confident joviality. “To whom? To me? Happily or unhappily, I am insured against these fires. To Madam de Bonnivet? If she does not love me, what risk does she run? If she loves me, she will be grateful. Suffering requires feeling, and to women of this kind that is everything. But I think she is as hard as I am. As for Camille, it will develop her talent.”
“Suppose one of the lady admirers of the novels of your second period, Anciennes Amours or Martyre Intime, were to hear you now?” I said to him. “For this is quite the reverse of what you put in those two books.”
“Ah!” he said. “If one lived one’s books, there would be no trouble in writing them. Come. Let us go down quickly and have coffee. I want you to see the beginning of the first act. I have only one quality, but that is a strong one. I can compose. A play or novel of mine is compact, there is nothing useless in it. The first and third acts are the best in the play. Madam de Bonnivet prefers the second and Camille the fourth. All tastes are suited. Waiter, bring two cups of coffee and two fine cigars at once. Give me just time to cast my eye down the closing prices on the Stock Exchange and I am at your service. Good. My gold mine shares are going up. I am about three thousand francs to the good. How is your money invested?”
“I have not invested it,” I said sadly, “it stays where it is and brings in from two and a half to three per cent.”
“That is absurd!” Jacques said as he lit a cigar. “I will advise you. I have good friends, one of the Mosé among others, who keep me well informed. I know as much as they do, and if I were not a literary man, I should like to be a financier. But we must hurry. Queen Anne may be at the theatre this evening, though she has already seen the play four times. If she is there, you will see two comedies instead of one. But I am very glad to have met you this evening.”
CHAPTER II
This author who could when he liked depict with the greatest subtlety was no fit person to preside over a temperance society. When we reached the little theatre where La Duchesse Blue was being performed he was a little more jolly than the beautiful women who drove up in their carriages from all corners of fashionable Paris, suspected. I still felt the inexplicable attraction, a mixture of antipathy and admiration, of which I have spoken. I listened to Jacques as he told me his plans for new works, and I forgot his horrible failings of heart and character in my admiration for the imagination from which ideas spurted, as I had seen the lava in the crater of Vesuvius do, while fiery stones of the size of a man shot into the air with a report like a cannon. There the atmosphere is suffocating and full of stench. The sulphur smokes beneath your feet and burns them. Tears trickle from your eyes. Your breath fails. It is unbearable. But this brutal outburst of the forces of nature keeps you there, hypnotizes you.