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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
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