I read, “Gambard, Nice, Villa des Palmiers.” I looked at him with astonishment, and he was still more astonished to see that his name did not produce any impression on me. He had a foreign accent.
“Well, you see, Madame, I came to ask you to sell me your group, After the Tempest.”
I began to laugh.
“Ma foi, Monsieur, I am treating for that with the firm of Susse, and they offer me 6000 francs. If you will give ten you may have it.”
“All right,” he said. “Here are 10,000 francs. Have you pen and ink?”
“No.”
“Ah,” said he, “allow me!” And he produced a little case in which there were pen and ink.
I made out the receipt, and gave him an order to take the group from my studio in Paris. 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.
XXVI
THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE GOES TO LONDON
Shortly after, I came back to Paris. At the theatre they were preparing for a benefit performance for Bressant, who was about to retire from the stage. It was agreed that Mounet-Sully and I should play an act from Othello, by Jean Aicard. The theatre was well filled, and the audience in a good humour. After the song 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 these unseemly manifestations, but each member of the audience, taken as a separate individual, would be ashamed to admit that he participated in them. 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.