Lost Illusions (Penguin Classics) (40 page)

C
ORALIE
rejoined Florine in her bedroom in order to put on the clothes she had sent there in advance. Lucien knew nothing of the expense lavished on actresses or mistresses by prosperous merchants who want to enjoy life. Although Matifat, who had not so considerable a fortune as his friend Camusot, had done things in a slightly parsimonious way, Lucien was surprised to see a tastefully decorated dining-room tapestried in gilt-studded green cloth, brightly lit with fine lamps, furnished with well-stocked
jardinières
; and a drawing-room hung with yellow silk embellished with motifs in brown and resplendent with the furniture then in fashion, including a chandelier by Thomire and a Persian carpet. Clock, candelabras and fire-place were all in good taste. Matifat had arranged for all the decoration to be done by Grindot, a young architect who was building him a house and who, knowing the purpose of these apartments, gave particular attention to his task. That is why Matifat, always the business man, seemed to be
continuously thinking of the bills and regarded these extravagances as so many jewels imprudently removed from their casket.

‘And that’s what I shall be obliged to do for Florentine.’ This thought could be read in old Cardot’s eyes.

Lucien suddenly understood why the condition of his room gave no concern to Lousteau, the journalist whom Florine loved. As he was the unsuspected lord of the feast, Etienne could enjoy all these beautiful things. And so his pose was that of the master of the house as he stood in front of the hearth chatting with the theatre manager, who was congratulating Du Bruel.

‘Copy! Copy!’ shouted Finot as he came in. ‘There’s nothing in the newspaper letter-box. The compositors have my article and will soon have finished it.’

‘We’re coming round to it,’ said Etienne. ‘We shall find a table and a fire in Florine’s boudoir. If Monsieur Matifat would be so kind as to provide us with paper and ink, we’ll throw the newspaper together while Florine and Coralie are changing.’

Cardot, Camusot and Matifat disappeared, hurrying to find quills, pen-knives and everything the two writers required. At this moment one of the prettiest dancers of the time, Tullia, rushed into the room.

‘My dear child,’ she said to Finot. ‘You’ve got your hundred subscriptions. They’ll cost the management nothing, for they’re already allotted – the singers, the orchestra and the corps de ballet have had to take them. Your paper is so amusing that no one will complain. You’ll get your boxes. In fact, here’s the money for the first quarter’ – and she handed him two banknotes. ‘So don’t pull me to pieces.’

‘I’m done for,’ cried Finot. ‘I no longer have the leading article for my number, since I shall have to go and cancel my infamous diatribe.’

‘How gracefully you move, my divine Laïs,’ exclaimed Blondet, following the dancer in with Nathan, Vernou and Claude Vignon whom he had brought with him. ‘You’ll stay to supper with us, dear love, or I’ll have you squashed like
the butterfly you are. Since you’re a dancer, there’ll be no rivalry here over talent. And as far as beauty’s concerned, you all have too much sense to be jealous in public.’

‘For Heaven’s sake, my friends, Du Bruel, Nathan, Blondet, save me!’ cried Finot. ‘I need five columns.’

‘I’ll fill two of them with the review,’ said Lucien.

‘I’ve a subject for one,’ said Lousteau.

‘Well then, Nathan, Vernou, Du Bruel, provide me with some pleasantries for the last page. Our good Blondet can easily supply the two small columns on page one. I must run to the printer’s. Fortunately, Tullia, you have your carriage with you.’

‘Yes, but the Duke’s in it with the German envoy,’ she said.

‘Let’s invite the Duke and the envoy,’ said Nathan.

‘A German! He’ll drink well, listen hard, and we’ll say so many outrageous things that he’ll write to his Court about them,’ cried Blondet.

‘Which, of all of us, is a sufficiently grave personage to go down and speak to him?’ asked Finot. ‘Come, Du Bruel, you’re one of our bureaucrats: bring up the Duc de Rhétoré and the envoy, and give your arm to Tullia. Goodness! how beautiful she is this evening!’

‘We shall be thirteen at table!’ said Matifat, turning pale.

‘No, fourteen,’ cried Florentine on entering. ‘I
must
keep an eye on my lord Cardot!’

‘Besides,’ said Lousteau, ‘Blondet has brought Claude Vignon along.’

‘I brought him for a drink,’ replied Blondet as he annexed an inkpot.

‘Now then, the rest of you,’ he said, addressing Nathan and Vernou. ‘You must have sparkle enough for the fifty-six bottles of wine we’re about to drink. And mind you stir up Du Bruel: as a writer of vaudevilles, he can very well produce a number of malicious quips. Squeeze some epigrams from him.’

Fired with the desire to win recognition in the presence of so many people of mark, Lucien wrote his first article on the
round table in Florine’s boudoir under the gleam of the pink candles which Matifat had lit.

PANORAMA DRAMATIQUE

First performance: ‘The Alcalde in Difficulties’, imbroglio in three acts. – Mademoiselle Florine’s début. – Mademoiselle Coralie. – Bouffé.

People come and go, talk and walk, look round for something and find nothing: all’s bustle and hustle. The alcalde can’t find his daughter but he has found the cap he had lost. But the cap doesn’t fit. It must belong to some thief or other. But where’s the thief? People come and go, talk and walk and search more frantically than before. The alcalde ends up by finding a man, but no daughter; then his daughter, but no man, which satisfies the magistrate though not the audience. Calm returns; the alcalde wants to question the man. The old alcalde sits down in a big alcaldic arm-chair and adjusts his alcaldic sleeves. Spain is the only country where alcaldes are attached to flowing sleeves and where you see alcaldes’ necks surrounded with the ruffs which, on the Paris stage, it’s one half of an alcalde’s job to wear. This alcalde, who had been so busy trotting about with the short steps of a wheezy old man, is Bouffé: Bouffé the successor of Potier, a young actor who is so good in old men’s parts that he makes the oldest men laugh. There’s a future for a hundred old men in that bald forehead, that quavering voice, those spindle-shanks trembling under the body of a Gerontius. He’s so old, this young actor, that he frightens people: they fear his oldness may be passed on like a contagious disease. And what an admirable alcalde! What a charming, anxious smile, what fussy stupidity! What stupid dignity! What magisterial hesitancy! How well this man knows that anything may be true or false alternately! How worthy he is to be the minister of a constitutional monarch! At each question the alcalde puts, the stranger puts a question to him; Bouffé replies, in such wise that, answers coming in shape of questions, the alcalde clears things up by the questions he asks. This superlatively comic scene, which has a touch of Molière in it, set the audience rocking. Everybody on the stage seems to have reached agreement, but I’m not competent to sort it all out. The alcalde’s daughter was there, played by a real Andalusian girl, with Spanish eyes, Spanish complexion, Spanish waistline and Spanish gait: a Spanish girl from head to foot, with a dagger in her garter,
love in her heart and a cross dangling from the end of a ribbon over her bosom. At the end of the act someone asked me how the play was going. I told him: ‘It’s wearing red stockings with green clocks; it has the tiniest foot (in patent shoes) and the finest leg in Andalusia!’

Ah! this alcalde’s daughter makes you drool with love and arouses wicked thoughts. You want to leap on to the stage to offer her your heart and your hearth, or maybe an income of thirty thousand francs and your pen. This Andalusian is the loveliest actress in Paris. Coralie, since that’s the name she goes by, is capable of playing the countess or the shop-girl. There’s no knowing in which part she would be more attractive. She will be what she wants to be. She has it in her to play any part: is not that the best thing one can say of any actress in the boulevard theatres?

In the second act a Spanish girl arrives from Paris with her cameo face and bewitching eyes. I asked a question in my turn: where did she come from? I was told she had come from the slips and that her name was Florine; but really I couldn’t believe it, there was so much fire in her movements and so much fury in her love. This rival of the alcalde’s daughter is the wife of a hidalgo in a cloak cut to Almaviva’s style, with enough material in it to clothe a hundred hidalgos of the boulevard theatres. If Florine had neither red stockings with green clocks nor patent shoes, she had a mantilla and a veil which she turned to admirable purpose, great lady that she is! She showed wonderfully well that a tigress may turn into a she-cat. I gathered from the stinging repartee of these two girls that there was some drama of jealousy between them. Then, when everything was almost settled, the alcalde’s stupidity threw everything back into confusion. All that world of torches and tapers, valets, Figaros, hidalgos, alcaldes, girls and women began it all anew: searchings, comings, goings and turnings. Then the plot was pieced together again and I left it at that, for the two women, the jealous Florine and the happy Coralie entangled me once more in the folds of their basquines and their mantillas, and I could see nothing but their dainty little feet.

I was able to get to Act III without making any disturbance, without the police being called in or the audience being scandalized, and from now on I believe in the power of public and religious morality which the Chamber of Deputies worries so much about that you might suppose there’s no morality left in France. I was able to understand that it’s all a matter of one man loving two women without being loved by them, or being loved by them
without returning their love, who doesn’t love alcaldes or isn’t loved by alcaldes; but he’s undoubtedly a worthy hidalgo who loves someone, himself – or God as a makeshift, for he becomes a monk. If you want to know more, hurry along to the Panorama-Dramatique.

‘You now know quite well that you must go there for the first time in order to get acclimatized to those triumphant red stockings with red clocks, that dainty, promising little foot, those eyes sparkling with sunbeams and the wiles of a Parisienne disguised as an Andalusian or an Andalusian disguised as a Parisienne. Then you must go a second time to enjoy the play: the old man will send you into fits of laughter and the lovelorn hidalgo will bring you to tears. In both respects the play’s a hit. The author, they say, wrote it in collaboration with one of our great poets; he has aimed at success by bringing you a pair of amorous girls, one in each hand, thereby lifting the pit to the seventh heaven of emotional turmoil. The legs of these two young ladies seemed to have more wit than the author. Nevertheless, once these two rivals left the stage, one discovered that the dialogue was scintillating, and that is a convincing proof of the excellence of the play. The author was acclaimed amid a clamour of applause which gave some anxiety to the architect who built the theatre; but the author, who is accustomed to the rumblings of the intoxicated Vesuvius seething under the chandeliers, was not alarmed. His name? Monsieur de Cursy. As for the two actresses, they danced the famous Seville bolero which, in former times, found favour with the Fathers of the Council and which has passed the censor despite the perilous provocations of its postures. This bolero has enough in it to attract all the elderly gentlemen who don’t know what to do with the remnants of their love-life. I am charitable enough to advise them to keep the lenses of their opera-glasses from getting blurred.