"Well! Madame, think that Jesus, who was the son of God and whose works and speech, sown in time and space, have yielded great harvests, think that Jesus died so unknown that Josephus, almost his contemporary, the grandson of the high-priests and descendant of the Maccabees, captain general of the Galileans, historian of all the little details of Jewish history,—Josephus had never heard of Jesus. I could give you more accessible examples, but this is primordial and those among us, who go through with an obscure life, unjustly, should not deem themselves humiliated: their day will come if they are worthy, and if not, it is quite useless that a light should spring up which will have to be extinguished."
"You are all quite haughty," said Sixtine, "you would not be vexed to be compared, in your wretched distresses, with the Son of Man."
"Oh!" answered Hubert, "I never dreamed of such a ridiculous blasphemy. Just as saints and less lofty souls, endowed with good will, take for example the human career of Jesus, and console themselves for their merited sufferings by thinking of the unmerited injuries of Christ, so it is permitted us to assuage the feeling of our disappointments by similar meditations. Would you have us take for themes of prayer the life of Socrates, who died unknown to the Greeks? Would you have us take Spinoza? He was a polisher of spectacle glasses, a drinker of milk, and he died of starvation, not of penury, because his mind was distracted and he forgot to nourish himself, having other things to do."
Sixtine was confounded with astonishment that he should give her such barren talk after their mutual esthetic and sentimental emotions. She attempted to reascend to the source to see if, this time, the craft would not take another branch of the stream.
She spoke of the acting, which she found perfect.
"Alas!" said Hubert. "Ignorance, sometimes, resembles genius among actors. Whoever is ignorant and yet must get out of a difficulty, invents badly or well, has recourse to personal souvenirs, to intuitive gestures. No, those we heard are perfect: they know all they have learned. Especially, nothing unforeseen: the foot goes like this, the hand like that, etc."
"At least," said Sixtine, "they pronounce well and speak clearly."
"It is proper, but without conviction. What woman, besides, outside of two or three select creatures...."
"I," thought Sixtine, "I, for example."
"... Could take this rôle royally enough to make one feel that it is not a rôle? Oh! the public is not exacting. The women come here to distract themselves, the men because it gives them ideas after a good dinner. Pathetic things to the former, cantharides to the latter. If they followed their inclinations most women would go to the Eden and most men to the Ambigu."