uous as were the apartments on Place
Vendome, they could not supply the place of those lost treasures. And
she plunged deeper than ever in her despair. One habitue of the house
succeeded, however, in drawing her out of it, Cabassu, who styled
himself on his cards "professor of massage;" a stout dark thick-set
man, redolent of garlic and hair-oil, square-shouldered, covered with
hair to his eyes, who knew stories of Parisian seraglios, trivial
anecdotes within the limited range of Madame's intellect. He came once
to rub her, and she wished to see him again, detained him. He was
obliged to abandon all his other customers and to become the _masseur_
of that able-bodied creature, at a salary equal to that of a senator,
her page, her reader, her body-guard. Jansoulet, overjoyed to see that
his wife was contented, was not conscious of the disgusting absurdity
of the intimacy.

Cabassu was seen in the Bois, in the enormous and sumptuous caleche
beside the favorite gazelle, at the back of the theatre boxes which the
Levantine hired, for she went abroad now, revivified by her masseur's
treatment and determined to be amused. She liked the theatre,
especially farces or melodramas. The apathy of her unwieldy body was
minimized in the false glare of the footlights. But she enjoyed
Cardailhac's theatre most of all. There the Nabob was at home. From the
first manager down to the last box-opener, the whole staff belonged to
him. He had a key to the door leading from the corridor to the stage;
and the salon attached to his box, decorated in Oriental fashion, with
the ceiling hollowed out like a bee-hive, divans upholstered in camel's
hair, the gas-jet enclosed in a little Moorish lantern, was admirably
adapted for a nap during the tedious _entr'actes_: a delicate
compliment from the manager to his partner's wife. Nor had that monkey
of a Cardailhac stopped at that: detecting Mademoiselle Afchin's liking
for the stage, he had succeeded in persuading her that she possessed an
intuitive knowledge of all things pertaining to it, and had ended by
asking her to cast a glance in her leisure moments, the glance of an
expert, upon such pieces as he sent to her. An excellent way of binding
the partnership more firmly.

Poor manuscripts in blue or yellow covers, which hope has tied with
slender ribbons, ye who take flight swelling with ambition and with
dreams, who knows what hands will open you, turn your leaves, what
prying fingers will deflow