ackground. She never complained, for she loved
him too well; moreover success makes us indulgent and every evening
she was compelled to quit the shade in which she strove to conceal and
efface herself, to obey the summons enthusiastically calling her to the
footlights. This singular jealousy was soon noticed at the theatre, and
their fellow actors made fun of it. They overwhelmed the singer with
compliments about his wife's singing. They thrust under his eyes the
newspaper article in which after four long columns devoted to the star,
the critic bestowed a few lines to the fast fading vogue of the husband.
One day, having just read one of these articles, he rushed into his
wife's dressing-room, holding the open paper in his hand and said to
her, pale with rage:

"The fellow must have been your lover." He had indeed reached this
degree of injustice. In fact the unhappy woman, praised and envied,
whose name figured in large type on the play bills and might be read on
all the walls of Paris, who was seized upon as a successful advertising
medium and placed on the tiny gilt labels of the confectioner or
perfumer, led the saddest and most humiliating of lives. She dared not
open a paper for fear of reading her own praises, wept over the flowers
that were thrown to her and which she left to die in a corner of her
dressing-room, that she might avoid perpetuating at home the cruel
memories of her triumphant evenings. She even wanted to quit the stage,
but her husband objected.

[Illustration: p084-095]

"It will be said that I make you leave it." And the horrible torture
continued for both.

One night of a first representation, the songstress was going to the
front, when somebody said to her: "Mind what you are about. There is
a cabal in the house against you." She laughed at the idea. A cabal
against her? And for what reason, Good Heavens! She who only met with
sympathy, who did not belong to any coterie! It was true however. In
the middle of the opera, in a grand duet with her husband, at the moment
when her magnificent voice had reached the highest pitch of its compass,
finishing the sound in a succession of notes, even and pure like the
rounded pearls of a necklace, a volley of hisses cut her short. The
audience was as much moved and surprised as herself. All remained
breathless, as though each one felt prisoner within them the passage
she had not been able to finish. Suddenly a horrible, mad idea flashed
across her min