“Ah,” said he, “allow me.” And he produced a little case in which there was pen and ink.
I made out the receipt, and gave him an order to go and take the group at Paris, in my studio. He went away, and I heard the bells of the horses ringing and then dying away in the distance. After this I was often invited to the house of this original person, who was one of the negro kings of Nice.
Shortly after I came back to Paris. At the theater they were preparing for the benefit night of Bressant, who was about to leave the stage. It was agreed that Mounet-Sully and I should play an act from “Othello,” by Jean Aicard. The theater was well filled, and the audience in a good humor. After the song of Saule, I was in bed as Desdemona, when suddenly I heard the public laugh, softly at first, and then irrepressibly. Othello had just come in, in the darkness, in his shirt or very little more, with a lantern in his hand, and gone to a door hidden in some drapery. The public, that impersonal unity, has no hesitation in taking part in a manifestation of unseemly mirth that each member of the audience, taken as a separate individual, would be ashamed to admit. But the ridicule thrown on this act by the exaggerated pantomime of the actor prevented the play being staged again, and it was only twenty years later that “Othello,” as an entire play, was produced at the Théâtre Français. I was then no longer there.
After having played Berenice, in “Mithridate,” successfully, I took up again my rôle of the Queen in “Ruy Blas.” The play was as successful at the Théâtre Français as at the Odéon, and the public was, if anything, still more favorable to me. Mounet-Sully played Ruy Blas. He took the part admirably, and was infinitely better than Lafontaine, who played it at the Odéon. Frédéric Febvre, very well dressed, represented his part very well, but he was not so good as Geffroy, who was the most distinguished and the most frightful Don Salluste that could be imagined.
My relations with Perrin were more and more strained.
He was pleased that I was successful, for the sake of the theater; he was happy at the magnificent receipts of “Ruy Blas”; but he would have much preferred that it had been another than I who received all the applause. My independence, my horror of submission, even in appearance, annoyed him vastly.
One day my servant came to tell me that an elderly Englishman was asking to see me so insistently that he thought it better to come and tell me, though I had given orders I was not to be disturbed.
“Send him away and let me work in peace.”
I was just commencing a picture which interested me very much. It represented a little girl on Palm Sunday, carrying branches of palm. The little model who posed for me was a lovely Italian of eight years old. Suddenly she said to me:
“He’s quarreling—that Englishman!”