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By Root 1717 0

an endless vista; and the electric bulb placed at the top of the frame must at night, when it was lit, followed by the procession of twenty or more reflexions similar to its own, give to the drinker, even when alone, the idea that the surrounding space was multiplying itself simultaneously with his sensations, heightened by intoxication, and that, shut up by himself in this little cell, he was reigning nevertheless over something far more extensive in its indefinite luminous curve than a passage in the “Jardin de Paris.” Being then myself at this moment the said drinker, suddenly, looking for him in the glass, I caught sight of him, a hideous stranger, staring at me. The joy of intoxication was stronger than my disgust; from gaiety or bravado, I gave him a smile which he returned. And I felt myself so much under the ephemeral and potent sway of the minute in which our sensations are so strong, that I am not sure whether my sole regret was not at the thought that the hideous self whom I had just caught sight of in the glass was perhaps on his last legs, and that I should never meet that stranger again for the rest of my life.

Robert was annoyed only because I did not seem to want to shine more in the eyes of his mistress.

“What about that fellow you met this morning who combines snobbery with astronomy? Do tell her about him, I’ve forgotten the story,” and he watched her out of the corner of his eye.

“But, my dear boy, there’s nothing more to say than what you’ve just said.”

“What a bore you are. Then tell her about Françoise in the Champs-Elysées. She’ll enjoy that.”

“Oh, do! Bobby has told me so much about Françoise.” And taking Saint-Loup by the chin, she said once more, for want of anything more original, drawing the said chin nearer to the light: “Hallo, you!”

Since actors had ceased to be for me exclusively the depositaries, in their diction and playing, of an artistic truth, they had begun to interest me in themselves; I was amused, imagining that I was contemplating the characters in some old comic novel, to see the heroine of the play, struck by the new face of the young man who had just come into the stalls, listen abstractedly to the declaration of love which the juvenile lead was addressing to her, while he, through the running fire of his impassioned speech, still kept a gleaming eye fixed on an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his fancy; and thus, thanks mainly to the information that Saint-Loup had given me as to the private lives of actors, I saw another drama, mute but expressive, enacted beneath the words of the spoken drama which in itself, although of little merit, interested me too; for I could feel germinating and blossoming within it for an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of grease-paint and pasteboard, and on his individual soul of the words of a part, those robust if ephemeral, and rather captivating, personalities which are the characters in a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to see again after one has left the theatre, but who by that time have already disintegrated into an actor who is no longer in the situation which was his in the play, into a text which no longer shows the actor’s face, into a coloured powder which a handkerchief wipes off, who have returned, in short, to elements that contain nothing of them, because of their dissolution, effected as soon as the play is over—a dissolution which, like that of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death.

One number in the programme I found extremely painful. A young woman whom Rachel and some of her friends disliked was to make her debut with a recital of old songs—a debut on which she had based all her hopes for the future of herself and her family. This young woman was possessed of an unduly, almost grotesquely prominent rump and a pretty but too slight voice, reduced still further by her nervousness and in marked contrast to her muscular development.