Somehow Brainard managed to get fed, and then the fatherly cabby received him and bore him on through the gas-lighted streets, soft and lambent and vocal, and at the end of another hour deposited him in front of what Brainard took to be a theater—a modest-looking building enough. From the poster he saw that it was the Français.
The great Théâtre Français! He beamed back at cabby, who gesticulated with his whip and urged him on. Cabby had begun sympathetically to comprehend his lunatic.
They played Cyrano that night, it happened. Though the fluent lines rolled too swiftly over Brainard’s head for his feeble comprehension of the language, he understood the wonderful actors. For the first time in the twenty-eight years of his existence, he realized what is art—what it is to conceive and represent life with living creatures, to clothe dull lines of print with human passions. This was what he had dreamed might be when he descended from his gallery seat in a Broadway theater—but what never was.
Cabby was asleep on the box outside when Brainard emerged from his dream. At the young American’s touch, he awoke, and, chirping to his decrepit horse, bore the stranger to his hotel. At the door they exchanged vivid protestations of regard, and a couple of pieces of gold rolled into cabby’s paw.
“He understood!” Brainard murmured gratefully. “Demain—demain!” he cried; and the cocher cracked his whip.
The next two days were the most wonderful that Brainard had ever spent. He slept but a few hours each night—was there not all the rest of life to sleep in? Under the fat cabby’s guidance he roamed day and night. He would murmur from time to time some famous name which seemed to act on cabby like a cabalistic charm,—Louvre, Panthéon, Arc de Triomphe, Invalides, Bastille, Luxembourg, Nôtre Dame. At noon and at night they drew up before some marvelous restaurant where the most alluring viands were to be had. Each evening there was a theater, carefully chosen by cabby; and there Brainard spent enchanted hours, drinking in at every sense the meaning of the play, savoring the charm of intonation, of line, of gesture—the art which seemed innate in these people.
For was he not, as he had said to Krutzmacht, by profession a dramatist?
The third day he bethought him of the French lady of the Toulouse, and gave her address to his guardian. With her he made an expedition to Versailles. On their return from the château, they dined at a little restaurant at Ville d’Avray, the Frenchwoman carefully ordering the food and the wine.
As the twilight fell across the old ponds and over the woods where Corot had once wandered, Brainard murmured softly:
“Melody, my dear, I owe you a whole lot for this—more than I can ever pay you, no matter how much I can squeeze out of those Dutchmen for your bonds and stock!” And then, aloud, “Here’s to Melody—God bless her!”