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By Root 1395 0

because there was thought to be something about them that suggested Pompeii, which were then generally despised, and which are now becoming fashionable again for one single and consistent reason (notwithstanding all the others that are advanced), namely, that they suggest the Second Empire. And there I would stay with my uncle until his man came with a message from the coachman, asking him at what time he would like the carriage. My uncle would then become lost in meditation, while his servant stood there agape, not daring to disturb him by the least movement, curiously awaiting his answer, which never varied. For in the end, after a supreme crisis of hesitation, my uncle would utter, infallibly, the words: “A quarter past two,” which the servant would echo with amazement, but without disputing them: “A quarter past two! Very good, sir … I’ll go and tell him …”

At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and so inaccurate was the picture I had formed in my mind’s eye of the pleasures to be enjoyed there that I almost believed that each of the spectators looked, as through a stereoscope, at a scene that existed for himself alone, though similar to the thousand other scenes presented to the rest of the audience individually.

Every morning I would hasten to the Morris column to see what new plays it announced. Nothing could be more disinterested or happier than the day-dreams with which these announcements filled my imagination, day-dreams which were conditioned by the associations of the words forming the titles of the plays, and also by the colour of the bills, still damp and wrinkled with paste, on which those words stood out. Nothing, unless it were such strange titles as the Testament de César Girodot or Oedipus Rex, inscribed not on the green bills of the Opéra-Comique but on the wine-coloured bills of the Comédie-Française, nothing seemed to me to differ more profoundly from the sparkling white plume of the Diamants de la Couronne than the sleek, mysterious satin of the Domino Noir; and since my parents had told me that, for my first visit to the theatre, I should have to choose between these two pieces, I would study exhaustively and in turn the title of one and the title of the other (for these were all that I knew of either), attempting to snatch from each a foretaste of the pleasure it promised, and to compare this with the pleasure latent in the other, until in the end I succeeded in conjuring up such vivid and compelling pictures of, on the one hand, a play of dazzling arrogance, and on the other a gentle, velvety play, that I was as little capable of deciding which of them I should prefer to see as if, at the dinner-table, I had been obliged to choose between rice à l’Impératrice and the famous chocolate cream.

All my conversations with my friends bore upon actors, whose art, although as yet I had no experience of it, was the first of all its numberless forms in which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its enjoyment. Between one actor’s tricks of intonation and inflection and another’s, the most trifling differences would strike me as being of an incalculable importance. And from what I had been told of them I would arrange them in order of talent in lists which I used to recite to myself all day and which ended up by hardening in my brain and hampering it by their immovability.

And later, in my schooldays, whenever I ventured in class, as soon as the master’s head was turned, to communicate with some new friend, I would always begin by asking him whether he had already been to the theatre, and whether he agreed that our greatest actor was Got, our second Delaunay, and so on. And if, in his judgment, Febvre came below Thiron, or Delaunay below Coquelin, the sudden volatility which the name of Coquelin, forsaking its stony rigidity, would acquire in my mind, in order to move up to second place, the miraculous agility, the fecund animation with which the name of Delaunay would suddenly be endowed, to enable it to slip down to fourth, would