Proud, yes, because even if they often come out with a
“What a lousy profession!” or a
“What a rotten life!,” I’ve never heard one of them sigh,
“How unhappy I am . . . ”
Proud, and resigned to exist for only one hour out of the twenty-four!
Because the audience is unfair, and even if it applauds them, it forgets them later.
A newspaper may keep watch, with indiscreet concern, over the doings of Mademoiselle X of the Comedie-Francaise, whose opinions on fashion, politics, food, and love will fill the idle hours of the whole world every week; but poor little intelligent and sensitive Bouty—who will stoop to wonder what you are doing, thinking, or keeping mum about, after the darkness has reclaimed you and you’re walking down the Boulevard Rochechouart around midnight, almost transparently thin in your long “English-style” overcoat that you bought at the Samaritaine department store?
For the twentieth time, all alone, I ruminate these depressing thoughts.
Meanwhile, my fingers are alertly and unconsciously performing their customary task: white greasepaint, pink greasepaint, powder, dry pink, blue, brown, red, black . . . I have hardly finished when a hard claw scratches at the bottom of my door.
I open it at once, because it’s the begging paw of a little female Brabancon terrier who performs in the first part of the show.
“There you are, Nelle!”
She comes in trustingly, as serious as a confidential clerk, and lets me pat her little back, burning hot from her performance, while her teeth, slightly yellowed by age, nibble at a cookie.
Nelle has ginger-red, shiny fur and a black face like a marmoset’s in which beautiful squirrel eyes gleam.
“Another cookie, Nelle?”
Well brought up, she accepts it unsmilingly.
Behind her, in the corridor, her family is waiting for her.
Her family is a tall, thin man, taciturn and unfathomable, who never talks to anyone, as well as two courteous white collies who resemble their master.
Where is this man from?
What roads have led him and his collies here, looking like three princes who have come down in the world?
His way of tipping his hat, his body language, are like those of a socialite, as is his long, sharp face . . . My colleagues, perhaps guessing correctly, have dubbed him “the archduke.”
In the corridor he waits for Nelle to finish her cookie.
There’s nothing sadder, more dignified, or more scornful than this man and his three animals, proudly resigned to their destiny as vagabonds.
“Goodbye, Nelle . . . ”
I shut the door, and the little dog’s collar bells move away . . . Will I see her again?
Tonight is the end of a two-week period, and perhaps the end of a run for
“Antoniev and his dogs” . . .
Where will they go?
Where will Nelle’s lovely brown eyes gleam?—those eyes which tell me so distinctly:
“Yes, you pat me . . . yes, you love me . . . yes, you keep a box of cookies for me . . . but tomorrow, or the day after, we’ll part.
Ask me for nothing more than the politeness of a nice little dog who can walk on her front paws and do a somersault.
Like repose and a feeling of security, for us affection is an unattainable luxury . . .”
FROM EIGHT in the morning till two in the afternoon, when the weather is good, my ground-floor apartment, situated between two cliffs of new houses, enjoys a sliver of sunshine.
First, a sparkling brush paints a stroke on my bed, where it widens into a square “napkin,” and my coverlet casts a pink reflection onto the ceiling . . . I lazily wait for the sun to reach my face and dazzle me through my closed eyelids, and the shadow of people walking outside passes rapidly over me, like a dark, blue wing . . .
Or else I jump out of bed, galvanized, and I begin some feverish scouring: Fossette’s ears undergo a delicate probing, and her fur shines beneath the firm brush . . . Or else, in the merciless bright light, I inspect every part of my body that is already growing feeble: the fragile silk of my eyelids; the corner of my mouth, which my smiles are beginning to mark with an unhappy fold; and those three lines around my neck, which an invisible hand is pushing a little more deeply into my flesh every day . . .
It’s that severe examination which is disturbed today by a visit from my partner Brague, who’s always lively, serious, and wide awake.
I welcome him, as I do in my dressing room, loosely wrapped in a crepon kimono, to which, one rainy day, Fossette’s paws added little four-petaled grayish flowers . . . No need to powder my nose for Brague’s sake, or to lengthen my eyelids with a blue streak . . . Brague looks at me only when we rehearse; at such times he’ll tell me:
“Don’t do that, it’s ugly . . . Don’t open your mouth upward, you look like a fish . . . Don’t blink your eyes, you look like a white rat . . . Don’t wiggle your behind when you walk, you look like a mare . . . ”
It was Brague who guided, if not my first steps, at least my first gestures, on the stage, and if I still show him a student’s trustingness, for his part he rarely forgets to call me “an intelligent amateur”; that is, he has little patience with my protests, and insists on having his own way . . .
This morning he comes in, plasters down the hair in back of his neck as if he were pushing down a wig, and, since his clean-shaven Catalan face always retains that alert gravity which makes it so distinctive, I wonder whether he’s bringing good or bad news . . . He surveys my sunbeam like a precious object and looks at my two windows:
“What do you pay for your ground floor?”
“I’ve already told you: seventeen hundred.”
“And it’s an elevator building, too! . . .
Pretty sunshine, you’d think you were in Nice! . . .
Oh, by the way: we’re booked for an evening performance.”
“When?”
“When?
Why, tonight!”
“Oh!”
“What do you mean, ‘Oh!’
Does it disturb any plans?”