“Now,” said he, as he seated himself, “I will listen without moving an eyelid should your story last, like the creation, six days and nights.”

Gerfaut took two or three turns about the room with the air of an orator who is seeking for a beginning to a speech.

“You know,” said he, “that Fate has more or less influence over our lives, according to the condition of mind in which we happen to be.  In order that you may understand the importance of the adventure I am about relating to you, it will be necessary for me to picture the state of mind which I was in at the time it happened; this will be a sort of philosophical and psychological preamble.”

“Thunder!” interrupted Marillac, “if I had known that, I would have ordered a second bowl.”

“You will remember,” continued Gerfaut, paying no attention to this pleasantry, “the rather bad attack of spleen which I had a little over a year ago?”

“Before your trip to Switzerland?”

“Exactly.”

“If I remember right,” said the artist, “you were strangely cross and whimsical at the time.  Was it not just after the failure of our drama at the Porte Saint-Martin?”

“You might also add of our play at the Gymnase.”

“I wash my hands of that.  You know very well that it only went as far as the second act, and I did not write one word in the first.”

“And hardly one in the second.  However, I take the catastrophe upon my shoulders; that made two perfect failures in that d—–­d month of August.”

“Two failures that were hard to swallow,” replied Marillac, “We can say, for our consolation, that there never were more infamous conspiracies against us, above all, than at the Gymnase.  My ears ring with the hisses yet!  I could see, from our box, a little villain in a dress coat, in one corner of the pit, who gave the signal with a whistle as large as a horse-pistol.  How I would have liked to cram it down his throat!” As he said these words, he brought his fist down upon the table, and made the glasses and candles dance ’upon it.

“Conspiracy or not, this time they judged the play aright.  I believe it would be impossible to imagine two worse plays; but, as Brid Oison says, ‘These are things that one admits only to himself’; it is always disagreeable to be informed of one’s stupidity by an ignorant audience that shouts after you like a pack of hounds after a hare.  In spite of my pretension of being the least susceptible regarding an author’s vanity of all the writers in Paris, it is perfectly impossible to be indifferent to such a thing—­a hiss is a hiss.  However, vanity aside, there was a question of money which, as I have a bad habit of spending regularly my capital as well as my income, was not without its importance.  It meant, according to my calculation, some sixty thousand francs cut off from my resources, and my trip to the East was indefinitely postponed.