‘Really?… Poor girl!’ said Lucien, altogether flattered in his vanity at these words and feeling his heart swelling with self-satisfaction. ‘My friend, more things are happening to me in one evening than ever did in the first eighteen years of my life.’
And Lucien told him of his love affair with Madame de Bargeton and his hatred for Baron Châtelet.
‘Why now, our paper’s short of an Aunt Sally, we’ll stick our claws in him. This baron’s an Empire beau and he sides with the Government. He’ll suit us down to the ground. I’ve often seen him at the Opera-House. I can see your great lady from here: she’s often in the Marquise d’Espard’s box. The Baron’s courting your ex-mistress, who reminds me of a cuttle-bone. Wait a minute! Finot has just sent me an urgent note telling me that the paper is short of copy: that’s a trick played on him by one of our contributors, a nasty little man, Hector Merlin, because he’s had his blank space cut down. In despair, Finot is knocking up an article against the Opera. Well then, my boy, write a review for this play: listen to it, ponder over it. As for me, I’m going to the editor’s office to think up three columns on your man and your disdainful beauty. She won’t feel much inclined for merrymaking in the morning.’
‘So that’s how and where your paper is made up?’
‘That’s how – always,’ Lousteau replied. ‘I’ve been on it for ten months, and it’s always short of copy at eight o’clock in the evening.’
In typographers’ slang, they call ‘copy’ the manuscript to be set up, doubtless because the writers are supposed only to send a copy of what they have written. Perhaps also it may be an ironical rendering of the Latin word copia (abundance), for copy is never abundant.
‘The great scheme which will never come off,’ Lousteau continued, ‘is to have a few numbers ready in advance. It’s ten o’clock, and not a line is written. In order to give the number a brilliant finish, I’m going to tell Vernou and Nathan to lend us a score of epigrams on the deputies, Chancellor Cruzoé,1 the Ministers and, if need be, our own friends. In such straits one is ready to murder one’s father, one is like a corsair who loads his cannon with his prize money in order to stay alive. Make your article witty and you’ll have done a lot to get into Finot’s good books: he shows gratitude as a matter of calculation. His acquaintance is the best and soundest you can make – apart from the pawnbrokers of course.’
‘But what sort of men are you journalists?’ exclaimed Lucien. ‘You mean one has to sit down at a table and pour out wit…?’
‘Yes, it’s absolutely like lighting a lamp: you burn it till there’s no oil left.’
Just as Lousteau was opening the door of the box, the manager and and Du Bruel came in.
‘Monsieur,’ said the author of the play to Lucien. ‘Allow me to tell Coralie on your behalf that you will go off with her after supper, or my play will fail. The poor girl doesn’t know what she’s saying or what she’s doing; she’ll be laughing when she should be crying and vice versa. There’s already been some hissing. You might still save the play. In any case the pleasure which awaits you is no misfortune.’
‘Monsieur, it’s not my habit to tolerate rivals,’ Lucien answered.
‘Don’t repeat that remark to Coralie,’ cried the manager with a glance at Du Bruel. ‘Coralie’s the sort of girl to fling Camusot out through the window and would well and truly ruin herself. The worthy proprietor of the Golden Cocoon allows Coralie two thousand francs a month and pays for all her dresses and claqueurs.’
‘Since your promise would in no way bind me,’ said Lucien with the air of an oriental potentate, ‘carry on: save your play.’
‘But don’t give the impression of snubbing this charming girl,’ said Du Bruel in supplicating tones.
‘Very well then,’ cried the poet. ‘I see I must write the review of your play and smile on your leading lady. So be it!’
The author vanished after beckoning to Coralie, who from that moment acted with wonderful verve. Bouffé, who was playing the role of an elderly alcalde and for the first time revealing his talent for making up as an old man, came in front amidst a thunder of applause and said: ‘Gentlemen, the play we have had the honour to perform is by Monsieur Raoul Nathan and Monsieur de Cursy.’1
‘Well well!’ said Lousteau. ‘Nathan has had a hand in it. I’m no longer surprised he’s here.’
The pit had risen to its feet. ‘Coralie! Coralie’ they all shouted.
From the box containing the two merchants a voice thundered out: ‘And Florine!’
‘Florine and Coralie!’ a few voices repeated in response.
The curtain rose once more and Bouffé reappeared with the two actresses, to each of whom Matifat and Camusot threw a bouquet. Coralie picked up hers and held it out towards Lucien. The two hours he had spent in the theatre had been like a dream to him. His visit to the wings, horrible as they were, had begun the weaving of the spell. In them the innocent poet had caught the first whiff of disorderly and voluptuous life. In these dirty corridors encumbered with stage machinery and reeking with oil-lamps reigns a pestilence which destroys the soul. In them life has no longer anything sacred or real. Serious things are laughed at and impossible things seem true. This acted on Lucien like a narcotic, and Coralie completed the process by plunging him into a sort of joyful intoxication. The chandelier was put out. By then the auditorium was empty save for the box-openers who were making an inordinate clatter as they removed the small benches and shut up the boxes. From the footlights, which had been snuffed out like a single candle, emanated a noisome odour. The curtain was raised. A lantern was let down from the flies. The firemen and theatre hands started their round. The magic of the scenery, the spectacle of pretty women filling the boxes, the blazing lights, the resplendent enchantment of back-cloths and new costumes gave place to coldness, desolation, darkness, emptiness. Everything looked hideous. Lucien’s surprise was indescribable.
‘Well well, are you coming, my boy?’ said Lousteau from the stage. ‘Jump up here from the box.’
Lucien reached the stage with one bound. He scarcely recognized Florine and Coralie in their undress, muffled up in their cloaks and coarse wraps, wearing hats with black veils, looking in short like butterflies which have reverted to the larval state.
‘Will you do me the honour of giving me your arm?’ Coralie asked in a tremble.
‘Willingly,’ Lucien replied. He did so, and felt her feeling the actress’s heart beating against his like that of a bird.
The actress pressed close to the poet with the soft and ardent voluptuousness of a cat rubbing against her master’s leg.
‘So we are going to have supper together!’ she said to him.
The four of them left the theatre and found two cabs waiting at the stage door opening on to the rue des Fossés-du-Temple. Coralie showed Lucien into the one in which Camusot and his father-in-law, the worthy Cardot, were already seated. Coralie offered the fourth seat to Du Bruel. The stage manager went off with Florine, Matifat and Lousteau.
‘These cabs are frightful!’ said Coralie.
‘Why do you have no carriage?’ asked Du Bruel.
‘Why?’ she cried bad-temperedly. ‘I don’t want to say why in front of Monsieur Cardot who has no doubt trained his son-in-law. Could you believe that, shrivelled and old as he is, Monsieur Cardot gives Florentine no more than five hundred francs a month – just enough to pay for her rent, her bread-and-butter and her footwear. The old Marquis de Rochegude, who has an income of six hundred thousand francs, has been offering me a coupé for the last two months. But I’m an artiste and not a street-girl.’
‘You shall have your carriage the day after tomorrow, Mademoiselle,’ said Camusot solemnly. ‘But you never asked me for one.’
‘Does one ask for such things? When one loves a woman, how can one leave her to pad about in the mire and run the risk of breaking her legs by going everywhere on foot? You have to be a Knight of the Yardstick to like a gown with mud on its hem.’
&nbs
p; As she uttered these words, with a sourness which broke Camusot’s heart, Coralie was feeling for Lucien’s leg and pressing it between her own. She took his hand and squeezed it. Then she remained silent and seemed to become absorbed in one of those moods of infinite rapture which compensate these poor creatures for their past woes and disappointments and awake in them a kind of poetic feeling unknown to other women – those who, fortunately for them, are not subject to such violent revulsions of feeling.
‘In the end your acting was as good as that of Mademoiselle Mars,’ said Du Bruel to Coralie.
‘Yes,’ said Camusot, ‘something seemed to be worrying Mademoiselle Coralie at the beginning; but from the middle of the second act she swept the audience off its feet. She can claim half the credit for your success.’
‘And I for hers,’ said Du Bruel.
‘You’re both talking nonsense,’ she said in a changed tone of voice.
The actress took advantage of a moment of darkness to raise Lucien’s hand to her lips and kiss it and wet it with her tears. This stirred Lucien to the marrow of his bones. There is a splendour of humility in a love-stricken courtesan which can give points to the angels.
‘You will be writing the article, Monsieur,’ said Du Bruel to Lucien. ‘You will be able to work in a charming paragraph about our dear Coralie.’
‘Oh yes! Do us that little service,’ said Camusot in the tones of a man on his knees before Lucien. ‘You’ll find in me one well disposed to serve your interests at all times.’
‘By why can’t you leave this gentleman to do as he likes?’ cried the actress, exasperated. ‘He’ll write as he sees fit. Papa Camusot, you may buy me carriages, but not praise.’
‘You’ll have it at a very cheap price,’ was Lucien’s polite reply. ‘I have never written for the newspapers. I’m not well up in their way of doing things and you’ll have the virginity of my pen.’
‘That will be quite amusing,’ said Du Bruel.
‘Here we are in the rue de Bondy,’ said the puny old Cardot, whom Coralie’s outburst had reduced to stupefaction.
‘If I have the first fruits of your pen, you will have those of my heart,’ said Coralie during the brief instant she was alone with Lucien in the carriage.
17. How a news-sheet is edited
CORALIE 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 s
leeves. 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!’