"Let us walk about and look for pretty partners."
"I will gladly walk about; but as to dancing, I am done."
Robineau slapped his pockets softly, to flatten them, and followed Edouard, saying to himself:
"I am not sorry to be seen talking with an author; I will talk theatre with him, and people will think that he and I are working together on a play.—I will bet that you prefer the play to an evening party, eh, Monsieur Edouard?"
"That depends; there are pleasant parties and very tiresome plays."
"Oh! of course; but I mean to say that it is very pleasant to be an author.—I must tell you of a plot—I say a plot, but I have a dozen in my desk!—Oh! I have some astonishingly good ones!"
"I believe it."
"Plots for grand operas, opéra-comiques, vaudevilles, melodramas. Oh! I do a little of everything; I have an inexhaustible imagination, and if I had time——"
"Yes, time is always what those people lack who produce nothing."
"That is so, isn’t it? But I will show them to you. What I should like more than anything would be to have free admission to the theatres.—Ah! to be able to go behind the scenes, to see the actresses at close quarters, and the ballet-dancers, who make pirouettes, so they say, as they bid you good-evening! What a lot of conquests one might make!"