I shook my head, smiling.

‘You’re satisfied?’

‘More than satisfied,’ I answered.  ‘The thing is wonderful.’

‘I think it’s rather charming,’ he said.  ’By the way, I’ve just had an offer from New York for it, and another from Rome.’

I nodded my appreciation.

‘You don’t want anything?’

‘Nothing, thanks,’ I said, opening the box of bonbons, ’except these.  Thanks so much for thinking of them.’

‘Well—­’

And he left me again.

In the second act the legend—­has not the tale of La Valliere acquired almost the quality of a legend?—­grew in persuasiveness and in magnificence.  It was the hour of La Valliere’s unwilling ascendancy, and it foreboded also her fall.  The situations seemed to me to be poignantly beautiful, especially that in which La Valliere and Montespan and the Queen found themselves together.  And Morenita had perceived my meaning with such a sure intuition.  I might say that she showed me what I had meant.  Diaz, too, had given to my verse a voice than which it appeared impossible that anything could be more appropriate.  The whole effect was astonishing, ravishing.  And within me—­far, far within the recesses of my glowing heart—­a thin, clear whisper spoke and said that I, and I alone, was the cause of that beauty of sight and sound.  Not Morenita, and not Montferiot, not Diaz himself, but Magda, the self-constituted odalisque, was its author.  I had thought of it; I had schemed it; I had fashioned it; I had evoked the emotion in it.  The others had but exquisitely embroidered my theme.  Without me they must have been dumb and futile.  On my shoulders lay the burden and the glory.  And though I was amazed, perhaps naively, to see what I had done, nevertheless I had done it—­I!  The entire opera-house, that complicated and various machine, was simply a means to express me.  And it was to my touch on their heartstrings that the audience vibrated.  With all my humility, how proud I was—­coldly and arrogantly proud, as only the artist can be!  I wore my humility as I wore my black gown.  Even Diaz could not penetrate to the inviolable place in my heart, where the indestructible egoism defied the efforts of love to silence it.  And yet people say there is nothing stronger than love.

At the close of the act, while the ringing applause, much more enthusiastic than before, gave certainty of a genuine and extraordinary success, I could not help blushing.  It was as if I was in danger of being discovered as the primal author of all that fleeting loveliness, as if my secret was bound to get about, and I to be forced from my seclusion in order to receive the acclamations of Paris.  I played nervously and self-consciously with my fan, and I wrapped my humility closer round me, until at length the tumult died away, and the hum of charming, eager chatter reassured my ears again.