That’s enough.
You won’t get a seat for another week.
Take back your forty-five sous, and don’t let me catch you here till next Saturday or Sunday!
Now scram!”
The departure of the beefy guy, refused admittance for a week, is well worth my spending a few more minutes on it.
He slinks away on his noiseless felt slippers, stooped over, and only when back on the sidewalk does he put on his insolent expression again.
But his heart isn’t in it, his gait is artificial, and for a little while there’s no difference between this dangerous beast and a kid who’s been deprived of his dessert . . .
On the iron staircase, along with the heat rising from the radiator, smelling of plaster, charcoal, and ammonia, there comes to me in short gusts the voice of Jadin . . .
Oh, the little tart! She’s back with her neighborhood audience, and she’s recaptured it!
You need only hear the roars of laughter back there, the rumble with which they accompany her and support her.
That warm, rasping contralto, already affected by sprees and perhaps a touch of tuberculosis, goes right to your heart via the lowest and surest paths.
If a “knowledgeable, artistic” manager were somehow to find himself here, and if he were to hear Jadin, he’d exclaim:
“I’ll take her on, I’ll launch her career, and in three months you’ll see what I can make of her!”
A stuck-up, soured failure—that’s what he’d make of her . . . Experiments of that kind aren’t very encouraging: where would Jadin of the messy hair shine more brightly than here?
There she is on the stairs, looking just the same as when she left, yes sir, with a dress too long for her, frayed at the hem by her own heels, with her Marie Antoinette fichu, yellow from the smoke in the theater and revealing her skinny young body, with her sloping shoulder and her vulgar mouth, her curled upper lip with a mustache of powder on its down . . .
I feel a keen, real pleasure in seeing once again this foulmouthed girl; for her part, she clatters down the last few steps, throws herself onto me, and squeezes my hands in her warm “mitts”: somehow or other, her escapade has brought us closer together.
She follows me into my dressing room, where I hazard a discreet reproach:
“Jadin, it’s disgusting, you know!
You don’t drop people that way!”
“I went to see my mother,” Jadin says with a perfectly straight face.
But she can see herself fibbing in the mirror, and her whole childish face breaks into a laugh, widening, with slit eyes, like the face of a very young Angora cat . . .
“Really think so? . . .
You must all have been bored to death here without me!”
She radiates a self-confident pride, basically surprised that the Empyree-Clichy hasn’t put up its shutters during her absence . . .
“I haven’t changed, have I? . . .
Oh, what beautiful flowers!
May I?”
Her swift shoplifter’s hand, formerly skilled at swiping oranges from stands, has grasped a big purple rose, before I’ve even opened the little envelope attached to the side of a large bouquet, which has been standing and waiting for me on my makeup shelf:
Maxime Dufferein-Chautel with his respectful compliments.
Dufferein-Chautel!
At last I’ve rediscovered the big ninny’s name!
Ever since the other night I’ve been too lazy to open the guide to Parisian socialites, and I’ve alternated between calling him Thureau-Dangin, Dujardin-Beaumetz, and Duguay-Trouin . . .
“I’ll say these are flowers!” Jadin exclaims while I undress. “Are they from your boyfriend?”
I protest with a sincerity that’s in vain:
“No, no!
It’s someone thanking me . . . for a private performance . . . ”
“Too bad!” Jadin decrees, like a competent judge. “These are flowers from a real gentleman.
The guy I took off with the other day gave me flowers this big . . . ”
I burst out laughing: Jadin discussing the quality of flowers and of “guys” is irresistible . . . She turns bright red beneath her flour powder and takes offense:
“So! Maybe you don’t think he was a well-off dude?
Just ask Canut, the chief stagehand, how much dough I brought back last night right after you left!”
“How much?”
“Sixteen hundred francs, dearie!
Canut saw it, it’s no fairy tale!”
Do I look sufficiently impressed?
I doubt it . . .
“And what are you going to do with it, Jadin?”
She nonchalantly tugs at the threads hanging from her old white-and-blue dress:
“I’m sure it won’t go into a savings account.
I stood the stagehands a round of drinks.