“No,” I replied.
“Deserting.”
“You are mistaken,” I answered, “I am not deserting; I am changing barracks.”
Others then came to me and they all gave me advice tinged by their own personality, Mounet, as a seer or believer, Delaunay prompted by his bureaucratic soul, Coquelin as a politician blaming another person’s idea now, but extolling it later on and putting it into practice for his own profit—Febvre, a lover of respectability—Got, as a selfish old growler, understanding nothing but the orders of the powers that be and advancement as ordained on hierarchical lines. Worms said to me in his melancholy way:
“Will people be better elsewhere?”
Worms had the most dreamy soul and the most frank, straightforward character of any member of our illustrious company. I liked him immensely.
We were about to return to Paris and I wanted to forget all these things for a time. I was in a hesitating mood. I postponed taking a definite decision.
CHAPTER XXIII
I AGAIN LEAVE THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE
The stir that had been made about me, the good that had been said in my favor, and the bad things written against me, all this combined had created in the artistic world an atmosphere of battle. When on the point of leaving for Paris, some of my friends felt very anxious about the reception which I should get there. The public is very much mistaken in imagining that the agitation made about celebrated artistes is in reality instigated by the persons concerned and that they do it purposely. Irritated at seeing the same name constantly appearing on every occasion the public declares that the artiste who is either being slandered or pampered is an ardent lover of publicity. Alas! three times over alas! We are victims of the said advertisement. Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrity when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves. They are at the beginning of a series of small worries, thunderbolts hidden under flowers, but they know how to hold in check that monster advertisement. It is a sort of octopus with innumerable tentacles. It throws out its clammy arms on the right and on the left, in front and behind, and gathers in through its thousand little inhaling organs, all the gossip and slander and praise afloat to spit out again at the public when it is vomiting its black gall. But those who are caught in the clutches of celebrity at the age of twenty know nothing. I remember that the first time a reporter came to me I drew myself up straight and was as red as a coxcomb with joy. I was just seventeen years old—I had been acting in a private house and had taken the part of Richelieu with immense success. This gentleman came to call on me at home and asked me first one question and then another, and then another—I answered and chattered and was wild with pride and excitement. He took notes and I kept looking at my mother. It seemed to me that I was getting taller. I had to kiss my mother by way of keeping my composure and I hid my face on her shoulder to hide my delight. Finally, the gentleman rose, shook hands with me, and then took his departure. I skipped about in the room and began to turn round singing, “Trois petits pâtés, ma chemise brûle,” when suddenly the door opened and the gentleman said to mamma, “Oh, madame, I forgot, this is the receipt for the subscription to the journal! It is a mere nothing, only sixteen francs a year.” Mamma did not understand at first. As for me, I stood still with my mouth open, unable to digest my petits pâtés. Mamma then paid the sixteen francs and in her pity for me, as I was crying by that time, she stroked my hair gently. Since then I have been delivered over to the monster, bound hand and foot, and I have been and still am accused of adoring advertisement. And to think that my first claims to celebrity were my extraordinary thinness and delicate health. I had scarcely made my début when epigrams, puns, jokes, and caricatures concerning me were indulged in by everyone to their heart’s content. Was it really for the sake of advertising myself that I was so thin, so small, so weak, and was it for this, too, that I remained in bed six months of the year, laid low by illness? My name became celebrated before I was, myself. At the first night of Louis Bouilhet’s piece “Mlle. Aïssé” at the Odéon, Flaubert, who was an intimate friend of the author, introduced an attaché of the British Embassy to me.