He was so handsome that night, with his wide forehead, which seemed to retain the light, his thick, silvery fleece of hair, and his laughing, luminous eyes.
Not daring to fling myself in Victor Hugo’s arms, I fell into Girardin’s, the sure friend of my first steps, and burst into tears. He took me aside in my dressing-room. “You must not let yourself be intoxicated with this great success, now,” he said. “There must be no more risky jumps, now that you are crowned with laurels. You will have to be more yielding, more docile, more sociable.”
“I feel that I shall never be yielding nor docile, my friend,” I answered, looking at him. “I will try to be more sociable, but that is all I can promise. As to my crown, I assure you that in spite of my risky jumps—and I feel that I shall always be making jumps—the crown will not shake off.”
Paul Maurice, who had come up to me, overheard this conversation and reminded me of it on the evening of the first performance of “Angelo,” at the Sarah Bernhardt Theater, on the 7th of February, 1905.
CHAPTER XVI
I LEAVE THE ODÉON
On returning home, I sat up a long time talking to Mme. Guérard, and when she wanted to go I begged her to stay longer. I had become so rich in hopes and future that I was afraid of thieves. My petite dame stayed on with me, and we talked till daybreak. At seven o’clock we took a cab and I drove my dear friend home, and then continued driving for another hour. I had already achieved a fair number of successes: “Le Passant,” and “Le Drame de la Rue de la Paix”; Anna Danby in “Kean,” and “Jean-Marie,” but I felt that the “Ruy Blas” success was greater than any of the others, and that this time I had become some one likely to be criticised, but not to be overlooked.
I often went in the morning to Victor Hugo’s and he was always very charming and kind.
When I was quite at my ease with him, I told him about my first impressions, about all my stupid, nervous rebellion with regard to him, about all that I had been told and all that I had believed, in my naïve ignorance about political matters.
On this particular morning, the master took great delight in my conversation. He sent for Mme. Drouet, the sweet soul, the companion of his glorious and rebellious mind. He told her, in a laughing, but melancholy way, about the evil work of bad people, in sowing error in every soil, whether favorable or not. That morning is engraved forever in my mind, for the great man talked a long time. Oh, it was not for me, but for what I represented in his eyes! Was I not, as a matter of fact, the young generation, in whom a bourgeois and clerical education had warped the intelligence, by closing the mind to every generous idea, to every flight toward the New?