Madame stared at him.
“But why not?” she said. “Of course!”
Jean would have given anything in the world for her to have told him to tear them up; they were the letters to the Princes asking them to hear Salvi sing, and Madame Torialli knew it.
“I am consumed with curiosity,” cried Salvi. “Dear good Monsieur Jean, have the kindness to show me those addresses. I am an expert in handwriting.”
“My dear!” said Madame Torialli, “that must be for some other time—the post goes.”
Jean seized the opportunity to make his farewells and to hurry downstairs and out of the house. He posted the letters, and when he had posted them he obeyed a sudden impulse and, calling a taxi, he drove direct to Margot’s. He felt that he wanted to hear her voice.
CHAPTER XXIII
LOUIS Flaubert was not satisfied with what nature had done for him. It seemed to him that he was born to rival Torialli, and so far facts had disagreed with him. Yet he was far cleverer than the famous singer (who, after all, wasn’t singing any more); he could trick him and hoodwink and bearlead him. Why, then, did all Paris turn its head to look after one man and remain blindly unconscious of the other?
Flaubert could not answer this question, but he could at any rate defy it; and he thought, as the frog thought in the fable, that a little self-advertisement was all that he really needed. He would draw the eye of Paris to him. And when Paris had looked he would trust to his own wits to keep her attention. It was for this end alone that Flaubert was prepared to fling a small fortune into the entertainment at which he hoped that Salvi was to sing.
A fashionable Revue suggested itself to his mind as the most taking thing for Paris. Paris is very fond of Revues—so many things can be put in a Revue that sound quite harmless when they are sung, without being nearly as harmless as they sound; and that is what Paris likes, because half the charm of a bad thing would cease to exist if it could not be made to resemble a good one. To appear to be what you are bores Paris. She would always dress her peasants to look like kings and queens, and her kings and queens to look like peasants.