“No! do you think so, my dear?  Just suppose your father should have a theatre of his own and act again as in former days.  You don’t remember; you were too small then.  But he had tremendous success, no end of recalls.  One night, at Alencon, the subscribers to the theatre gave him a gold wreath.  Ah! he was a brilliant man in those days, so lighthearted, so glad to be alive.  Those who see him now don’t know him, poor man, misfortune has changed him so.  Oh, well!  I feel sure that all that’s necessary is a little success to make him young and happy again.  And then there’s money to be made managing theatres.  The manager at Nantes had a carriage.  Can you imagine us with a carriage?  Can you imagine it, I say?  That’s what would be good for you.  You could go out, leave your armchair once in a while.  Your father would take us into the country.  You would see the water and the trees you have had such a longing to see.”

“Oh! the trees,” murmured the pale little recluse, trembling from head to foot.

At that moment the street door of the house was closed violently, and M. Delobelle’s measured step echoed in the vestibule.  There was a moment of speechless, breathless anguish.  The women dared not look at each other, and mamma’s great scissors trembled so that they cut the wire crooked.

The poor devil had unquestionably received a terrible blow.  His illusions crushed, the humiliation of a refusal, the jests of his comrades, the bill at the cafe where he had breakfasted on credit during the whole period of his managership, a bill which must be paid—­all these things occurred to him in the silence and gloom of the five flights he had to climb.  His heart was torn.  Even so, the actor’s nature was so strong in him that he deemed it his duty to envelop his distress, genuine as it was, in a conventional tragic mask.

As he entered, he paused, cast an ominous glance around the work-room, at the table covered with work, his little supper waiting for him in a corner, and the two dear, anxious faces looking up at him with glistening eyes.  He stood a full minute without speaking—­and you know how long a minute’s silence seems on the stage; then he took three steps forward, sank upon a low chair beside the table, and exclaimed in a hissing voice: 

“Ah!  I am accursed!”

At the same time he dealt the table such a terrible blow with his fist that the “birds and insects for ornament” flew to the four corners of the room.  His terrified wife rose and timidly approached him, while Desiree half rose in her armchair with an expression of nervous agony that distorted all her features.

Lolling in his chair, his arms hanging despondently by his sides, his head on his chest, the actor soliloquized—­a fragmentary soliloquy, interrupted by sighs and dramatic hiccoughs, overflowing with imprecations against the pitiless, selfish bourgeois, those monsters to whom the artist gives his flesh and blood for food and drink.