A Mummers Tale | Page 5

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 Angélique 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