“And Steiner?” asked Mignon sharply.

“Monsieur Steiner has gone away to the Loiret,” said Barillot, preparing to return to the neighborhood of the stage.  “I expect he’s gone to buy a country place in those parts.”

“Ah yes, I know, Nana’s country place.”

Mignon had grown suddenly serious.  Oh, that Steiner!  He had promised Rose a fine house in the old days!  Well, well, it wouldn’t do to grow angry with anybody.  Here was a position that would have to be won again.  From fireplace to console table Mignon paced, sunk in thought yet still unconquered by circumstances.  There was no one in the greenroom now save Fauchery and himself.  The journalist was tired and had flung himself back into the recesses of the big armchair.  There he stayed with half-closed eyes and as quiet as quiet could be, while the other glanced down at him as he passed.  When they were alone Mignon scorned to slap him at every turn.  What good would it have done, since nobody would have enjoyed the spectacle?  He was far too disinterested to be personally entertained by the farcical scenes in which he figured as a bantering husband.  Glad of this short-lived respite, Fauchery stretched his feet out languidly toward the fire and let his upturned eyes wander from the barometer to the clock.  In the course of his march Mignon planted himself in front of Potier’s bust, looked at it without seeming to see it and then turned back to the window, outside which yawned the darkling gulf of the courtyard.  The rain had ceased, and there was now a deep silence in the room, which the fierce heat of the coke fire and the flare of the gas jets rendered still more oppressive.  Not a sound came from the wings:  the staircase and the passages were deadly still.

That choking sensation of quiet, which behind the scenes immediately precedes the end of an act, had begun to pervade the empty greenroom.  Indeed, the place seemed to be drowsing off through very breathlessness amid that faint murmur which the stage gives forth when the whole troupe are raising the deafening uproar of some grand finale.

“Oh, the cows!” Bordenave suddenly shouted in his hoarse voice.

He had only just come up, and he was already howling complaints about two chorus girls who had nearly fallen flat on the stage because they were playing the fool together.  When his eye lit on Mignon and Fauchery he called them; he wanted to show them something.  The prince had just notified a desire to compliment Nana in her dressing room during the next interval.  But as he was leading them into the wings the stage manager passed.

“Just you find those hags Fernande and Maria!” cried Bordenave savagely.

Then calming down and endeavoring to assume the dignified expression worn by “heavy fathers,” he wiped his face with his pocket handkerchief and added: 

“I am now going to receive His Highness.”