The first blow was the heaviest and the most keenly felt, for it touched Lucien where he thought himself invulnerable—­in his heart and his love.  Coralie might not be clever, but hers was a noble nature, and she possessed the great actress’ faculty of suddenly standing aloof from self.  This strange phenomenon is subject, until it degenerates into a habit with long practice, to the caprices of character, and not seldom to an admirable delicacy of feeling in actresses who are still young.  Coralie, to all appearance bold and wanton, as the part required, was in reality girlish and timid, and love had wrought in her a revulsion of her woman’s heart against the comedian’s mask.  Art, the supreme art of feigning passion and feeling, had not yet triumphed over nature in her; she shrank before a great audience from the utterance that belongs to Love alone; and Coralie suffered besides from another true woman’s weakness—­she needed success, born stage queen though she was.  She could not confront an audience with which she was out of sympathy; she was nervous when she appeared on the stage, a cold reception paralyzed her.  Each new part gave her the terrible sensations of a first appearance.  Applause produced a sort of intoxication which gave her encouragement without flattering her vanity; at a murmur of dissatisfaction or before a silent house, she flagged; but a great audience following attentively, admiringly, willing to be pleased, electrified Coralie.  She felt at once in communication with the nobler qualities of all those listeners; she felt that she possessed the power of stirring their souls and carrying them with her.  But if this action and reaction of the audience upon the actress reveals the nervous organization of genius, it shows no less clearly the poor child’s sensitiveness and delicacy.  Lucien had discovered the treasures of her nature; had learned in the past months that this woman who loved him was still so much of a girl.  And Coralie was unskilled in the wiles of an actress —­she could not fight her own battles nor protect herself against the machinations of jealousy behind the scenes.  Florine was jealous of her, and Florine was as dangerous and depraved as Coralie was simple and generous.  Roles must come to find Coralie; she was too proud to implore authors or to submit to dishonoring conditions; she would not give herself to the first journalist who persecuted her with his advances and threatened her with his pen.  Genius is rare enough in the extraordinary art of the stage; but genius is only one condition of success among many, and is positively hurtful unless it is accompanied by a genius for intrigue in which Coralie was utterly lacking.

Lucien knew how much his friend would suffer on her first appearance at the Gymnase, and was anxious at all costs to obtain a success for her; but all the money remaining from the sale of the furniture and all Lucien’s earnings had been sunk in costumes, in the furniture of a dressing-room, and the expenses of a first appearance.