rrible 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.

Then he reviewed his whole theatrical life, his early triumphs, the
golden wreath from the subscribers at Alencon, his marriage to this
"sainted woman," and he pointed to the poor creature who stood by his
side, with tears streaming from her eyes, and trembling lips, nodding
her head dotingly at every word her husband said.

In very truth, a person who never had heard of the illustrious Delobelle
could have told his history in detail after that long monologue. He
recalled his arrival in Paris, his humiliations, his privations. Alas!
he was not the one who had known privation. One had but to look at his
full, rotund face beside the thin, drawn faces of the two women. But the
actor did not look so closely.

"Oh!" he said, continuing to intoxicate himself with declamatory
phrases, "oh! to have struggled so long. For ten years, fifteen years,
have I strugg