f this stout lady, her
page, her reader, her body-guard. Jansoulet, delighted to see his wife
contented, was unconscious of the ridicule attached to this intimacy.

Cabassu was now seen in the Bois, seated beside the favourite maid in
the huge and sumptuous open carriage, also at the back of the theatre
boxes taken by the Levantine, for she began to go out, since she had
grown less torpid under the treatment of her masseur and was determined
to amuse herself. The theatre pleased her, especially farces or
melodramas. The apathy of her large body found a stimulus in the false
glare of the footlights. But it was to Cardailhac's theatre that she
went for preference. There, the Nabob found himself in his own house.
From the chief superintendent to the humblest _ouvreuse_, the whole
staff was under his control. He had a key which enabled him to pass from
the corridors on to the stage; and the small drawing-room communicating
with his box was decorated in Oriental manner, with a concave ceiling
like a beehive, its couches covered in camel's hair, the flame of the
gas inclosed in a little Moorish lantern. Here one could enjoy a siesta
during rather long intervals between the acts; a gallant attention on
the part of the manager to the wife of his partner. Nor did that ape of
a Cardailhac stop at this. Remarking the taste of the Demoiselle Afchin
for the drama, he had ended by persuading her that she also possessed
the intuition, the knowledge of it, and by begging her when she had
nothing better to do to glance over and let him know what she thought
of the pieces that were submitted to him. A good way of cementing the
partnership more firmly.

Poor manuscripts in your blue or yellow covers, bound by hope with
fragile ribbons, that set out full of ambition and dreams, who knows
what hands may touch you, turn over your pages, what indiscreet fingers
deflower your charm, the charm of the unknown, that glittering dust
which lies on new ideas? Who may judge you and who condemn? Sometimes,
before dining out, Jansoulet, mounting to his wife's room, would find
her on her lounge, smoking, her head thrown back, bundles of manuscripts
by her side, and Cabassu, armed with a blue pencil, reading in his thick
voice and with the Bourg-Saint-Andeol accent, some dramatic lucubration
which he cut and scored without pity at the least criticism from the
lady.

"Don't disturb yourselves," the good Nabob would signal with his hand,
entering on tip