Thanks to these scandalous preliminaries, the people’s impatience had been aroused, and since the evening before, when the troupe arrived, there was talk of nothing but attending the first performance.  From the hour when the red posters announced Les Cloches de Corneville the victors prepared to celebrate their triumph.  In some offices, instead of the time being spent in reading newspapers and gossiping, it was devoted to devouring the synopsis and spelling out French novels, while many feigned business outside to consult their pocket-dictionaries on the sly.  So no business was transacted, callers were told to come back the next day, but the public could not take offense, for they encountered some very polite and affable clerks, who received and dismissed them with grand salutations in the French style.  The clerks were practising, brushing the dust off their French, and calling to one another oui, monsieur, s’il vous plait, and pardon! at every turn, so that it was a pleasure to see and hear them.

But the place where the excitement reached its climax was the newspaper office.  Ben-Zayb, having been appointed critic and translator of the synopsis, trembled like a poor woman accused of witchcraft, as he saw his enemies picking out his blunders and throwing up to his face his deficient knowledge of French.  When the Italian opera was on, he had very nearly received a challenge for having mistranslated a tenor’s name, while an envious rival had immediately published an article referring to him as an ignoramus—­him, the foremost thinking head in the Philippines!  All the trouble he had had to defend himself!  He had had to write at least seventeen articles and consult fifteen dictionaries, so with these salutary recollections, the wretched Ben-Zayb moved about with leaden hands, to say nothing of his feet, for that would be plagiarizing Padre Camorra, who had once intimated that the journalist wrote with them.

“You see, Quico?” said Camaroncocido.  “One half of the people have come because the friars told them not to, making it a kind of public protest, and the other half because they say to themselves, ’Do the friars object to it?  Then it must be instructive!’ Believe me, Quico, your advertisements are a good thing but the pastoral was better, even taking into consideration the fact that it was read by no one.”

“Friend, do you believe,” asked Tio Quico uneasily, “that on account of the competition with Padre Salvi my business will in the future be prohibited?”

“Maybe so, Quico, maybe so,” replied the other, gazing at the sky.  “Money’s getting scarce.”

Tio Quico muttered some incoherent words:  if the friars were going to turn theatrical advertisers, he would become a friar.  After bidding his friend good-by, he moved away coughing and rattling his silver coins.