I then locked myself in my bedroom, and, for the first time for many days, I regretted the separation from my convent. All my childhood rose up before me, and I cried more and more, and felt so unhappy that I wished I could die. Gradually, however, I began to get calm again and realized what had happened, and what my godfather’s words meant. Most decidedly I did not want to marry this man. Since I had been at the Conservatoire, I had learned a few things vaguely, very vaguely, for I was never alone, but I understood enough to make me not want to marry without being in love. I was, however, destined to be attacked in a quarter from which I should not have expected it. Mme. Guérard asked me to go up to her room to see the embroidery she was doing on a frame for my mother’s birthday.
My astonishment was great to find M. B—— there. He begged me to change my mind. He made me very wretched, for he pleaded with tears in his eyes.
“Do you want a larger marriage settlement?” he asked. “I would make it five hundred thousand francs.”
But it was not that at all, and I said in a very low voice:
“I do not love you, monsieur.”
“If you do not marry me, mademoiselle,” he said, “I shall die of grief.”
I looked at him and repeated to myself the words, “die of grief.” I was embarrassed and desperate, but at the same time delighted, for he loved me just as a man does in a play. Phrases that I had read or heard came to my mind vaguely, and I repeated them without any real conviction, and then left him without the slightest coquetry.
M. B—— did not die. He is still living, and has a very important financial position. He is much nicer now than when he was so black, for at present he is quite white.
I had just passed my first examination with remarkable success, particularly in tragedy. M. Provost, my professor, had not wanted me to compete in “Zaïre,” but I had insisted. I thought that scene with Zaïre and her brother Nivestan very fine, and it suited me. But when Zaïre, overwhelmed with her brother’s reproaches, falls on her knees at his feet, Provost wanted me to say the words, “Strike, I tell you! I love him!” with violence, and I wanted to say them gently, perfectly resigned to a death that was almost certain. I argued about it for a long time with my professor, and finally I appeared to give in to him during the lesson. But on the day of the competition I fell on my knees before Nerestan with a sob so real, my arms outstretched, offering my heart so full of love to the deadly blow that I expected, and I murmured with such tenderness, “Strike, I tell you! I love him!” that the whole house burst into applause and demanded it twice over.
The second prize for tragedy was awarded me, to the great dissatisfaction of the public, as it was thought that I ought to have had the first prize. And yet it was only just that I should have the second, on account of my age and the short time I had been studying. I had a first accessit for comedy in “La Fausse Agnes,” and Sarcey wrote an article about it.