making believe.
And he enjoyed the artist's compensation. If he were not really
Almaviva, he was sometimes just as happy as though he were.

I have seen him, at moments when he has fancied himself alone with his
Maker, adopt so gay and chivalrous a bearing, and represent his own part
with so much warmth and conscience, that the illusion became catching,
and I believed implicitly in the Great Creature's pose.

But, alas! life cannot be entirely conducted on these principles; man
cannot live by Almavivery alone; and the Great Creature, having failed
upon several theatres, was obliged to step down every evening from his
heights, and sing from half a dozen to a dozen comic songs, twang a
guitar, keep a country audience in good humour, and preside finally over
the mysteries of a tombola.

Madame Berthelini, who was art and part with him in these undignified
labours, had perhaps a higher position in the scale of beings, and
enjoyed a natural dignity of her own. But her heart was not any more
rightly placed, for that would have been impossible; and she had
acquired a little air of melancholy, attractive enough in its way, but
not good to see like the wholesome, sky-scraping, boyish spirits of her
lord.

He, indeed, swam like a kite on a fair wind, high above earthly
troubles. Detonations of temper were not unfrequent in the zones he
travelled; but sulky fogs and tearful depressions were there alike
unknown. A well-delivered blow upon a table, or a noble attitude,
imitated from Melingue or Frederic, relieved his irritation like a
vengeance. Though the heaven had fallen, if he had played his part with
propriety, Berthelini had been content! And the man's atmosphere, if not
his example, reacted on his wife; for the couple doated on each other,
and although you would have thought they walked in different worlds, yet
continued to walk hand in hand.

It chanced one day that Monsieur and Madame Berthelini descended with
two boxes and a guitar in a fat case at the station of the little town
of Castel-le-Gachis, and the omnibus carried them with their effects to
the Hotel of the Black Head. This was a dismal, conventual building in a
narrow street, capable of standing siege when once the gates were shut,
and smelling strangely in the interior of straw and chocolate and old
feminine apparel. Berthelini paused upon the threshold with a painful
premonition. In some former state, it seemed to him, he had visited a
hostelry that smel