es of family and religion, far from the theatre,
something as Triboulet hid his daughter Blanche in the little house of
the cul-de-sac Bucy. We understood that all the hopes and ambitions of
the man rested on the head of that charming girl, who, near all the
corruption of the theatre, had grown up in innocence and purity, as one
sees sometimes in the scanty grass of the faubourgs a field-flower
spring up by the door of a hovel.

[Illustration]

We were among the first at the funeral, to which we had been summoned by
a black-bordered billet.

A crowd of the people of the neighborhood encumbered the street before
the house of the dead, attracted by the pomps of the first-class funeral
ordered by the old comedian, who had preserved the taste of the _mise en
scene_ even in his grief. The magnificent hearse and cumbrous
mourning-coaches were already drawn up to the sidewalk, and under the
door, and in the shade of the heavy fringed and silvered draperies, amid
the twinkling of burning candles, between two priests reading prayers in
their Prayer-books, the form of the massive coffin could be seen under
its white cloth, covered with Parma violets.

As we walked among the crowd we noticed the groups formed of those who,
like us, were waiting the departure of the cortege. There were almost
all the actors, men and women, of Paris, who had come to pay their last
respects to the daughter of their comrade. Undoubtedly nothing could be
more natural; but we experienced not the less a strange sensation on
seeing, around the coffin of that pure young girl who had breathed away
her last breath in a prayer, the gathering of all those faces marked by
the brand of the theatre.

[Illustration]

They were all there: the stars, the comedians, the lovers, the traitors;
nobody was lacking: soubrettes, duennas, coquettes, first walking
ladies. Wearing a sack-coat and a felt hat on his long gray hair, the
superb adventurer of all the cloak and sword dramas leaned against the
shutter of a shop in his familiar attitude, and crossed his arms to show
his handsome hands; while a little old fellow with the wrinkled face of
a clown spoke to him briskly in the broad, harsh voice which had so
often made us explode with laughter. By the side of the aged first young
man, who, pinched in his scanty frock-coat, and with trousers trailing
under foot, twirled in his gloved hands his locks of over-black hair,
stood a great handsome fellow, beautiful as a m