A Mummer's Tale: Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The scene was an actress's dressing-room at the Od�on.

F�licie Nanteuil, her hair powdered, with blue on her eyelids, rouge on
her cheeks and ears, and white on her neck and shoulders, was holding
out her foot to Madame Michon, the dresser, who was fitting on a pair of
little black slippers with red heels. Dr. Trublet, the physician
attached to the theatre, and a friend of the actress's, was resting his
bald cranium on a cushion of the divan, his hands folded upon his
stomach and his short legs crossed.

"What else, my dear?" he inquired of her.

"Oh, I don't know! Fits of suffocation; giddiness; and, all of a sudden,
an agonizing pain, as if I were going to die. That's the worst of all."

"Do you sometimes feel as though you must laugh or cry for no apparent
reason, about nothing at all?"

"That I cannot tell you, for in this life one has so many reasons for
laughing or crying!"

"Are you subject to attacks of dizziness?"

"No. But, just think, doctor, at night, I see an imaginary cat, under
the chairs or the table, gazing at me with fiery eyes!"

"Try not to dream of cats any more," said Madame Michon, "because that's
a bad omen. To see a cat is a sign that you'll be betrayed by friends,
or deceived by a woman."

"But it is not in my dreams that I see a cat! It's when I'm wide awake!"

Trublet, who was in attendance at the Od�on once a month only, was given
to looking in as a friend almost every evening. He was fond of the
actresses, delighted in chatting with them, gave them good advice, and
listened with delicacy to their confidences. He promised F�licie that he
would write her a prescription at once.

"We'll attend to the stomach, my dear child, and you'll see no more cats
under the chairs and tables."

Madame Michon was adjusting the actress's stays. The doctor, suddenly
gloomy, watched her tugging at the laces.

"Don't scowl," said F�licie. "I am never tight-laced. With my waist I
should surely be a fool if I were." And she added, thinking of her best
friend in the theatre, "It's all very well for Fagette, who has no
shoulders and no hips; she's simply straight up and down. Michon, you
can pull a little tighter still. I know you are no lover of waists,
doctor. Nevertheless, I cannot wear swaddling bands like those �sthetic
creatures. Just slip your hand into my stays, and you'll see that I
don't squeeze myself too tight."

He denied that he was inimical to stays; he only condemned them when too
tightly laced. He deplored the fact that women should have no sense of
the harmony of line; that they should associate with smallness of the
waist an idea of grace and beauty, not realizing that their beauty
resided wholly in those modulations through which the body, having
displayed the superb expansion of chest and bosom, tapers off gradually
below the thorax, to glorify itself in the calm and generous width of
the flanks.

"The waist," he said, "the waist, since one has to make use of that
hideous word, should be a gradual, imperceptible, gentle transition from
one to another of woman's two glories, her bosom and her womb, and you
stupidly strangle it, you stave in the thorax, which involves the
breasts in its ruin, you flatten your lower ribs, and you plough a
horrible furrow above the navel. The negresses, who file their teeth
down to a point, and split their lips, in order to insert a wooden disc,
disfigure themselves in a less barbarous fashion. For, after all, some
feminine splendour still remains to a creature who wears rings in the
cartilage of her nose, and whose lip is distended by a circular disc of
mahogany as big as this pomade pot. But the devastation is complete when
woman carries her ravages into the sacred centre of her empire."

Dwelling upon a favourite subject, he enumerated one by one the
deformities of the bones and muscles caused by the wearing of stays, in
terms now fanciful, now precise, now droll, now lugubrious.

Nanteuil laughed as she listened. She laughed because, being a woman,
she felt an inclination to laugh at physical uncomeliness or poverty;
because, referring everything to her own little world of actors and
actresses, each and every deformity described by the doctor reminded her
of some comrade of the boards, stamping itself on her mind like a
caricature. Knowing that she herself had a good figure, she delighted in
her own young body as she pictured to herself all these indignities of
the flesh. With a ringing laugh she crossed the dressing-room towards
the doctor, dragging with her Madame Michon, who was holding on to her
stay-laces as though they were reins, with the look of a sorceress being
whisked away to a witches' sabbath.

"Don't be afraid!" she said.

And she objected that peasant women, who never wore stays, had far
worse figures than town-bred women.

The doctor bitterly inveighed against the Western civilizations because
of their contempt for and ignorance of natural beauty.

Trublet, born within the shadow of Saint-Sulpice, had gone as a young
man to practise in Cairo. He brought back from that city a little money,
a liver complaint, and a knowledge of the various customs of humanity.
When at a ripe age, he returned to his own country, he rarely strayed
from his ancient Rue de Seine, thoroughly enjoying his life, save that
it depressed him a trifle to see how little able his contemporaries were
to realize the deplorable misunderstandings which for eighteen centuries
had kept humanity at cross-purposes with nature.

There was a tap at the door.

"It's only me!" exclaimed a woman's voice in the passage.

F�licie, slipping on her pink petticoat, begged the doctor to open the
door.

Enter Madame Doulce, a lady who was allowing her massive person to run
to seed, although she had long contrived to hold it together on the
boards, compelling it to assume the dignity proper to aristocratic
mothers.

"Well, my dear! How-d'ye-do, doctor! F�licie, you know I am not one to
pay compliments. Nevertheless, I saw you the day before yesterday, and I
assure you that in the second of _La M�re confidente_ you put in some
excellent touches, which are far from easy to bring off."

Nanteuil, with smiling eyes, waited--as is always the case when one has
received a compliment--for another.

Madame Doulce, thus invited by Nanteuil's silence, murmured some
additional words of praise:

"...excellent touches, genuinely individual business!"

"You really think so, Madame Doulce? Glad to hear it, for I don't feel
the part. And then that great Perrin woman upsets me altogether. It is a
fact. When I sit on the creature's knees, it makes me feel as if----You
don't know all the horrors that she whispers into my ear while we are on
the stage! She's crazy! I understand everything, but there are some
things which disgust me. Michon, don't my stays crease at the back, on
the right?"

"My dear child," cried Trublet with enthusiasm, "you have just said
something that is really admirable."

"What?" inquired Nanteuil simply.

"You said: 'I understand everything, but there are some things which
disgust me.' You understand everything; the thoughts and actions of men
appear to you as particular instances of the universal mechanics, but in
respect of them you cherish neither hatred nor anger. But there are
things which disgust you; you have a fastidious taste, and it is
profoundly true that morals are a matter of taste. My child, I could
wish that the Academy of Moral Science thought as sanely as you. Yes.
You are quite right. As regards the instincts which you attribute to
your fellow-actress, it is as futile to blame her for them as to blame
lactic acid for being an acid possessing mixed properties."

"What are you talking about?"

"I am saying that we can no longer assign praise or blame to any human
thought or action, once the inevitable nature of such thoughts and
actions has been proved for us."

"So you approve of the morals of that gawk of a Perrin, do you? You, a
member of the Legion of Honour! A nice thing, to be sure!"

The doctor heaved himself up.

"My child," he said, "give me a moment's attention; I am going to tell
you an instructive story:

"In times gone by, human nature was other than it is to-day. There were
then not men and women only, but also hermaphrodites; in other words,
beings in whom the two sexes were combined. These three kinds of human
beings possessed four arms, four legs, and two faces. They were robust
and rotated rapidly on their own axes, just like wheels. Their strength
inspired them with audacity to war with the gods, therein following the
example of the Giants, Jupiter, unable to brook such insolence----"

"Michon, doesn't my petticoat hang too low on the left?" asked Nanteuil.

"Resolved," continued the doctor, "to render them less strong and less
daring. He divided each into two, so that they had now but two arms, two
legs, and one head apiece, and thenceforward the human race became what
it is to-day. Consequently, each of us is only the half of a human
being, divided from the other half, just as one divides a sole into two
portions. These halves are ever seeking their other halves. The love
which we experience for one another is nothing but an invisible force
impelling us to reunite our two halves in order to re-establish
ourselves in our pristine perfection. Those men who result from the
divisions of hermaphrodites love women; those women who have a similar
origin love men. But the women who proceed from the division of
primitive women do not bestow much attention upon men, but are drawn
toward their own sex. So do not be astonished when you see----"

"Did you invent that precious story, doctor?" inquired Nanteuil, pinning
a rose in her bodice.

The doctor protested that he had not invented a word of it. On the
contrary, he had, he said, left out part of the story.

"So much the better?" exclaimed Nanteuil. "For I must tell you that the
person who did invent it is not particularly brilliant."

"He is dead," remarked Trublet.

Nanteuil once more expressed her disgust of her fellow-actress, but
Madame Doulce, who was prudent and occasionally took _d�jeuner_ with
Jeanne Perrin, changed the subject.

"Well, my darling, so you've got the part of Ang�lique. Only remember
what I told you: your gestures should be somewhat restrained, and you
yourself a little stiff. That is the secret of the _ing�nue_. Beware of
your charming natural suppleness. Young girls in a 'stock' piece ought
to be just a trifle doll-like. It's good form. The costume requires it.
You see, F�licie, what you must do above all, when you are playing in
_La M�re confidente_, which is a delightful play----"

"Oh," interrupted F�licie, "so long as I have a good part, I don't care
a fig for the play. Besides, I am not particularly in love with
Marivaux----What are you laughing at, doctor? Have I put my foot in it?
Isn't _La M�re confidente_ by Marivaux?"

"To be sure it is!"

"Well, then? You are always trying to muddle me. I was saying that
Ang�lique gets on my nerves. I should prefer a part with more meat in
it, something out of the ordinary. This evenings especially, the part
gives me the creeps."

"All the more likely that you'll do well in it, my pet," said Madame
Doulce. "We never enter more thoroughly into our parts than when we do
so by main force, and in spite of ourselves. I could give you many
examples. I myself, in _La Vivandi�re d'Austerlitz_, staggered the house
by my gaiety of tone, when I had just been informed that my Doulce, so
great an artist and so good a husband, had had an epileptic fit in the
orchestra at the Od�on, just as he was picking up his cornet."

"Why do they insist on my being nothing but an _ing�nue_?" inquired
Nanteuil, who wanted to play the woman in love, the brilliant coquette,
and every part a woman could play.

"That is quite natural," persisted Madame Doulce. "Comedy is an
imitative art; and you imitate an art all the better for not feeling it
yourself."

"Do not delude yourself, my child," said the doctor to F�licie. "Once an
_ing�nue_, always an _ing�nue_. You are born an Ang�lique or a Dorine, a
C�lim�ne or a Madame Pernelle. On the stage, some women are always
twenty, others are always thirty, others again are always sixty. As for
you, Mademoiselle Nanteuil, you will always be eighteen, and you will
always be an _ing�nue_."

"I am quite content with my work," replied Nanteuil, "but you cannot
expect me to play all _ing�nues_ with the same pleasure. There is one
part, for example, which I long to play, and that is Agn�s in _L'�cole
des femmes_."

At the mere mention of the name of Agn�s, the doctor murmured
delightedly from among his cushions:

"Mes yeux ont-ils du mal pour en donner au monde?"

"Agn�s, that's a part if you like!" exclaimed Nanteuil. "I have asked
Pradel to give it me."

Pradel, the manager of the theatre, was an ex-comedian, a wideawake,
genial fellow, who had got rid of his illusions and nourished no
exaggerated hopes. He loved peace, books and women. Nanteuil had every
reason to speak well of Pradel, and she referred to him without any
feeling of ill will, and with frank directness.

"It was shameful, disgusting, rotten of him," she said. "He wouldn't let
me play Agn�s and gave the part to Falempin. I must say, though, that
when I asked him I didn't go the right way about it. While she knows how
to tackle him, if you like! But what do I care! If Pradel doesn't let
me play Agn�s, he can go to the deuce, and his dirty Punch and Judy show
too!"

Madame Doulce continued to lavish her unheeded precepts. She was an
actress of merits but she was old and worn out, and no longer obtained
any engagements. She gave advice to beginners, wrote their letters for
them, and thus, in the morning or evenings earned what was almost every
day her only meal.

"Doctor," asked F�licie, while Madame Michon was fastening a black
velvet ribbon round her neck: "You say that my fits of dizziness are due
to my stomach. Are you sure of that?"

Before Trublet could answer, Madame Doulce exclaimed that fits of
dizziness always proceeded from the stomach, and that two or three hours
after meals she experienced a feeling of distension in hers, and she
thereupon asked the doctor for a remedy.

F�licie, however, was thinking, for she was capable of thought.

"Doctor," she said suddenly, "I want to ask you a question, which you
may possibly think a droll one; but I do really want to know whether,
considering that you know just what there is in the human body, and that
you have seen all the things we have inside us, it doesn't embarrass
you, at certain moments, in your dealings with women? It seems to me
that the idea of all that must disgust you."

From the depths of his cushions Trublet, wafting a kiss to F�licie,
replied:

"My dear child, there is no more exquisitely delicate, rich, and
beautiful tissue than the skin of a pretty woman. That is what I was
telling myself just now, while contemplating the back of your neck, and
you will readily understand that, under such an impression----"

She made a grimace at him like that of a disdainful monkey.

"You think it witty, I suppose, to talk nonsense when anyone asks you a
serious question?"

"Well, then, since you wish it, mademoiselle, you shall have an
instructive answer. Some twenty years ago we had, in the post-mortem
room at the H�pital Saint-Joseph, a drunken old watchman, named Daddy
Rousseau, who every day at eleven o'clock used to lunch at the end of
the table on which the corpse was lying. He ate his lunch because he was
hungry. Nothing prevents people who are hungry from eating as soon as
they have got something to eat. Only Daddy Rousseau used to say: 'I
don't know whether it is because of the atmosphere of the room, but I
must have something fresh and appetizing.'"

"I understand," said F�licie. "Little flower-girls are what you want.
But you mustn't, you know. And there you are seated like a Turk and you
haven't written out my prescription yet." She cast an inquiring glance
at him. "Where is the stomach exactly?"

The door had remained ajar. A young man, a very pretty fellow and
extremely fashionable, pushed it open, and, having taken a couple of
steps into the dressing-room, inquired politely whether he might come
in.

"Oh, it's you!" said Nanteuil. And she stretched out her hand, which he
kissed with pleasure, ceremony and fatuity.

"How are you, Doctor Socrates?" he inquired, without wasting any
particular courtesies on Madame Doulce.

Trublet was often accosted in this manner, because of his snub-nose and
his subtle speech. Pointing to Nanteuil, he said:

"Monsieur de Ligny, you see before you a young lady who is not quite
sure whether she has a stomach. It is a serious question. We advise her
to refer, for the answer, to the little girl who ate too much jam. Her
mother said to her: 'You will injure your stomach.' The child replied:
'It's only ladies who have stomachs; little girls haven't any.'"

"Heavens, how silly you are, doctor!" cried Nanteuil.

"I would you spoke the truth, mademoiselle. Silliness is the capacity
for happiness. It is the sovereign content. It is the prime asset in a
civilized society."

"You are paradoxical, my dear doctor," remarked Monsieur de Ligny. "But
I grant you that it is better to be silly as everybody is silly than to
be clever as no one else is clever."

"It's true, what Robert says!" exclaimed Nanteuil, sincerely impressed.
And she added thoughtfully: "At any rate, doctor, one thing is certain.
It is that stupidity often prevents one from doing stupid things. I have
noticed that many a time. Whether you take men or women, those are not
the most stupid who act the most stupidly. For example, there are
intelligent women who are stupid about men."

"You mean those who cannot do without them."

"There's no hiding anything from you, my little Socrates."

"Ah," sighed the big Doulce, "what a terrible slavery it is! Every woman
who cannot control her senses is lost to art."

Nanteuil shrugged her pretty shoulders, which still retained something
of the angularity of youth.

"Oh, my great-grandmother! Don't try to kid the youngsters! What an
idea! In your days, did actresses control their--how did you put it?
Fiddlesticks! They didn't control them a scrap!"

Noticing that Nanteuil's temper was rising, the bulky Doulce retired
with dignity and prudence. Once in the passage, she vouchsafed a further
word of advice:

"Remember, my darling, to play Ang�lique as a 'bud.' The part requires
it."

But Nanteuil, her nerves on edge, took no notice.

"Really," she said, sitting down before her dressing-table, "she makes
me boil, that old Doulce, with her morality. Does she think people have
forgotten her adventures? If so, she is mistaken. Madame Ravaud tells
one of them six days out of seven. Everybody knows that she reduced her
husband, the musician, to such a state of exhaustion that one night he
tumbled into his cornet. As for her lovers, magnificent men, just ask
Madame Michon. Why, in less than two years she made mere shadows of
them, mere puffs of breath. That's the way she controlled them! And
supposing anyone had told her that she was lost to art!"

Dr. Trublet extended his two hands, palms outward, towards Nanteuil, as
though to stop her.

"Do not excite yourself, my child. Madame Doulce is sincere. She used
to love men, now she loves God. One loves what one can, as one can, and
with what one has. She has become chaste and pious at the fitting age.
She is diligent in the practices of her religion: she goes to Mass on
Sundays and feast days, she----"

"Well, she is right to go to Mass," asserted Nanteuil "Michon, light a
candle for me, to heat my rouge. I must do my lips again. Certainly, she
is quite right to go to Mass, but religion does not forbid one to have a
lover."

"You think not?" asked the doctor.

"I know my religion better than you, that's certain!"

A lugubrious bell sounded, and the mournful voice of the call-boy was
heard in the corridors:

"The curtain-raiser is over!"

Nanteuil rose, and slipped over her wrist a velvet ribbon ornamented
with a steel medallion. Madame Michon was on her knees arranging the
three Watteau pleats of the pink dress, and, with her mouth full of
pins, delivered herself from one corner of her lips of the following
maxim:

"There is one good thing in being old, men cannot make you suffer any
more."

Robert de Ligny took a cigarette from his case.

"May I?" And he moved toward the lighted candle on the dressing-table.

Nanteuil, who never took her eyes off him, saw beneath his moustache,
red and light as flame, his lips, ruddy in the candlelight, drawing in
and puffing out the smoke. She felt a slight warmth in her ears.
Pretending to look among her trinkets, she grazed Ligny's neck with her
lips, and whispered to him:

"Wait for me after the show, in a cab, at the corner of the Rue de
Tournon."

At this moment the sound of voices and footsteps was heard in the
corridor. The actors in the curtain-raiser were returning to their
dressing-rooms.

"Doctor, pass me your newspaper."

"It is highly uninteresting, mademoiselle."

"Never mind, pass it over."

She took it and held it like a screen above her head.

"The light makes my eyes ache," she observed.

It was true that a too brilliant light would sometimes give her a
headache. But she had just seen herself in the glass. With her
blue-tinted eyelids, her eyelashes smeared with a black paste, her
grease-painted cheeks, her lips tinted red in the shape of a tiny heart,
it seemed to her she looked like a painted corpse with glass eyes, and
she did not wish Ligny to see her thus.

While she was keeping her face in the shadow of the newspaper a tall,
lean young man entered the dressing-room with a swaggering gait. His
melancholy eyes were deeply sunken above a nose like a crow's beak; his
mouth was set in a petrified grin. The Adam's apple of his long throat
made a deep shadow on his stock. He was dressed as a stage bailiff.

"That you, Chevalier? How are you, my friend?" gaily inquired Dr.
Trublet, who was fond of actors, preferred the bad ones, and had a
special liking for Chevalier.

"Come in, everybody!" cried Nanteuil "This isn't a dressing-room; it's a
mill."

"My respects, none the less, Mme. Miller!" replied Chevalier, "I warn
you, there's a pack of idiots out in front. Would you believe it--they
shut me up!"

"That's no reason for walking in without knocking," replied Nanteuil
snappishly.

The doctor pointed out that Monsieur de Ligny had left the door open;
whereupon Nanteuil, turning to Ligny, said in a tone of tender reproach:

"Did you really leave the door open? But, when one comes into a room,
one closes the door on other people: it is one of the first things one
is taught."

She wrapped herself in a white blanket-cloak.

The call-boy summoned the players to the stage.

She grasped the hand which Ligny offered her, and, exploring his wrist
with her fingers, dug her nail into the spot, close to the veins, where
the skin is tender. Then she disappeared into the dark corridor.

Back to chapter list of: A Mummer's Tale