Molly Elliot Seawell

“ François laughed at this, and laughed still more when the Marquis inquired anxiously:
“I think it is that great, hulking fellow who sings and dances with her that frightens her. Perhaps she is in love with him; women are such crazy creatures!”
“Oh, no,” cried François, beginning to attack the supper which the waiter had brought, “Diane is not in love with Jean, nor with me either, strange to say, although I was born both handsome and rich.” ”

“ Her white kid gloves were dainty, and a great bunch of white and crimson roses combined with the blue cornflower made a tricolor in her lap, while on her breast was pinned a tricolor rosette.
As her carriage stopped, the crowd recognized her, and a huge shout went up:
“La Dorian! La Dorian!”
Diane was used to this cry. She bowed and smiled prettily, like the experienced actress she was, but that was not what the crowd wanted.
“Sing us La Marseillaise!” they shouted; “you can sing it as no one else can! Sing it, sing it to us!” ”

“ Diane rushed by the jailer, and ran along the corridor, down the stairs, and bareheaded into the courtyard. Egmont was there trying to subdue the panic among his men and to induce them to make a last stand, but no one heeded him. There was running to and fro and throwing down of arms and the steady cracking rifles of skilled soldiers.
Egmont, cursing and swearing, turned, and was faced by Diane.
“So,” she said, “you have killed the man I love. Well, then, I can love him just as much dead as when he was living. ”

“ Jean Leroux, a taciturn man, was, as usual, on or off the stage, watching Diane.
“At last I am in Bienville,” murmured Diane. “After so many years of longing and yearning! I feel that something will happen to me here, something great and splendid.”
“Now, Diane,” said Leroux, “don’t let François’ jokes get into your head as serious things. [10] Nothing is going to happen here. You sing pretty well, but you have no more chance of being a great opera singer than I have of being an archbishop. You haven’t the voice, my dear, for opera at all. You will never get beyond a good music hall artist.” ”

“ I would rather die ten times over than be his mistress. People are dying all around us all the time, and we shall go anyhow, a little sooner or a little later, and it doesn’t matter, particularly as you are to go too.”
“Certainly,” replied Jean with equal coolness. “You never were a coward, Diane, and most women, I think, would die rather than become this man’s mistress. As for myself”—Jean snapped his fingers in the air—“I have been looking death in the eye for ten months. It isn’t so bad, I assure you.”
Egmont, looking at them, flew into a maniacal rage. ”

“ Then her mind wandered to Jean. If she should have a splendid lover, how should she get on without Jean? It was he who taught her most that she knew about singing and had a peculiar scowl that he gave her [13] on the stage when she was getting off the key. Jean evidently did not fit into the plan of the splendid marriage which she was certain to make in Bienville, nor did anything seem to fit without Jean. While Diane was puzzling over this, she slipped into her narrow cot and fell asleep, the laughing stars and grinning moon gazing at her through the little window. ”

“ Angel. He grinned when he saw François.
“Here you are,” he said. “Come now, before we spoil your beauty, give us a song and dance.”
“My regular price for a performance,” said François, “is five hundred francs, and you probably have not that much about you. Besides, although, like you, my Marquis Egmont of the Holy Angels, I have not lived as a gentleman, unlike you, I mean to die as a gentleman.”
“Forward!” cried Egmont to the firing squad, which marched out and took their places.
The old priest lifted his bound hands and blessed and absolved them all, prisoners and murderers alike. ”

“ He, too, was big—an ugly, resolute man with an indomitable eye, and as honest as the day was long.
He looked at Diane as he spoke. She was dark haired and dark eyed, with a skin milk white in spite of grease paint, and had a vivid, irregular, theatrical beauty, in great contrast to the big, Juno-like manager’s wife. Also, she was so slight and thin as to deserve the name of [4] “Skinny,” which was freely applied to her by François, and she had a voice like the flute of Pan. In spite of her soft voice and gently drooping head, Diane had ten times the resolution of the resolute Jean Leroux. ”

“ Now, your Grace knows that I am a true penitent.”
“I think,” replied the Bishop, smiling and blinking, “that I stand no more chance of seeing Mathilde than you. We shall both be called upon to make our apologies to the Most High, shortly. Meanwhile, pray that when my time comes I may be as cool and unconcerned as you. I cannot say that I would wish to live as you have lived, Monsieur François le Bourgeois, as you call yourself, but I would certainly wish to die like you.”
“Ah!” cried François, gayly. “Living is much more important than dying. ”

“ He is the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel, called Egmont for short. I was just thinking,” continued François, making himself into a circle like a snake, “that there are no such things as trifles in this world. I went out just now and pulled up the window shade, and a certain man saw you. The pulling up of that shade was a momentous act, perhaps.”
“I knew something splendid would happen in Bienville,” murmured Diane. “The Marquis Egmont de St. Angel! What a splendid name! I never had a hand clap from a marquis before.”
Then it was time for François to go on the stage. ”

“ The Marquis’ undress uniform fitted him to perfection, and showed the supple beauty of his straight and sinewy figure. Then his voice was peculiarly sweet, not big and sonorous like Grandin’s, but rather low with a crispness in it like a man accustomed to giving orders.
They talked about nothings, as people do when the ladies of a party are not quite at ease. The Marquis was perfectly at ease, however, and had a laughing devil in his eye which responded promptly to the laughing devil in the eyes of François. ”

“ She was like a person hypnotized.
“Diane will be a big success with the officers of the garrison,” said François, laughing.
“You mean with the corporals,” said Jean. “François, you remind me of those soldiers called gentlemen-rankers, gentlemen, that is, who get into the ranks. They always give trouble. You don’t belong with us. You ought to go with people of your own kind, who understand your jokes.” ”

“ He was so absorbed in his composition that an hour passed, and he was surprised by the jailer bringing in supper at five o’clock. The jailer, who was more and more disposed to be friendly with his prisoner, laughed at the way in which François drew up his stool, surveyed the rude fare, and turned up his nose at it.
In the crises of life, men revert to their original type; so François, who called himself Le Bourgeois, suddenly and naturally became an aristocrat, such as he had been thirty years before. ”

“ Jean, thinking François was ill, drew aside a corner of the canvas at the end. François was huddled in a heap on the floor, clasping his knees and rocking back and forth, while strangled sobs and smothered cries burst from him. Jean, abashed, returned to his own bed.
The next morning, a bouquet of roses and a little note arrived from the Marquis. This gave unalloyed happiness to two persons—Diane and Grandin.
“A bouquet for a lady in my company from a marquis!” cried Grandin. “It’s enough to make a man mad with joy!” ”

“ And the second was the iron discipline of the stage which drags men and women apart when it seems like the tearing of a heart in two; which calls them from death-beds; which makes them report at the theatre when they are more dead than alive.
“There is the cathedral bell,” cried Diane in a choking voice, “and it tells me that I have been a wicked girl, and that I may be late for the performance.”
The Marquis stood up too, laughing at the jumble of ideas in Diane’s mind, but the next moment she was gone, speeding in and out of the maze. ”

“ The Marquis, known familiarly as Egmont, was at the music hall the next night, not in his splendid dragoon uniform, nor yet in evening dress, but in ordinary clothes which suggested the notion of a disguise on Egmont’s part, to François.
Evidently, the company as a whole, and Diane in particular, had made a great hit, for the former furniture shop was packed with persons. François went through his juggling and his tricks with the Grandins without the slightest nervousness. Not so, Diane. She began to give signs of what is dangerous and even fatal to an actress—self-consciousness. ”

“ No one knows the meaning of pain who has not suffered jealousy. The iron entered into Diane’s soul when she overheard Grandin saying to his wife that the new girl would soon be as good an actress as Diane, and was much handsomer, which was the truth. And everybody was so taken up with rehearsing Mademoiselle Rose; Diane felt herself already thrust out from that ideal world of the stage which to her was the real world. ”

“ Diane was kept smiling and bowing, and blushing under her grease paint, before the row of candles stuck in bottles that represented the footlights. This went on for so long that the next feature on the bill, a juggling act in which Grandin and his wife did miraculous things, was delayed ten minutes. Madame Grandin, who was more nearly without jealousy than any woman François had ever known, sat quite placidly in her tights and short skirts, and wrapped in a shawl, waiting for the hullabaloo to subside. ”

“ As François looked, his eyes lost their wild expression. He breathed freely like a man released from the grip of a wild beast. He even laughed, and in his excess of relief, turned a double somersault on the floor, and putting on his shabby coat and shabbier hat, went off whistling gaily. As he came out of the narrow, black alley entrance which did duty for a stage entrance, he saw the Marquis Egmont de St. Angel stepping across the street toward the Hotel Metropole. He had gone through his usual performance of watching Diane go home. ”

“ Diane had begged the Marquis to remain away from the music hall that night. She said to him in Madame Grandin’s presence:
“If I see you, and even think you are in the audience, I shall break down; I can never go through my part, and I shall be forever disgraced.”
“How ridiculous!” cried the Marquis, laughing. “What difference can it make to you now that you are to become the Marquise Egmont de St. Angel?”
Diane made no reply; she could not make [101] any one understand, who had not lived in the ideal world, what it meant to disgrace one’s self in public by breaking down. ”

“ He sat motionless, gazing into the dingy little unframed mirror hung against the canvas, apparently fascinated by the glare in his own eyes.
“Don’t stand on that bucket again, François, my man,” he said to himself between his clenched teeth. “If the dagger is on the floor— It is a clumsy thing, a blunt and horrid weapon to use on one’s self.”
In vain he tried to hold himself by his own glance into the mirror, as one man tries to cow another by his gaze. He backed away until his foot struck the overturned bucket; then he jumped up and glanced over into Diane’s dressing-room. ”

“ Then Jean spoke:
“It seems to me, Diane,” he said, “that you ought to have some man friend with you, M. Grandin, for example. Not that I wish to go. Oh, no, not for a moment!”
As Jean said these words, his strong, clean-shaven face was distorted for an instant. Everybody knew that he least of any one in [85] the world wished to see Diane married to another man.
“Diane is a quick study,” said François, laughing, “but it will take her all of three weeks to learn her part as a marquise. It is the best joke I ever heard—a joke on her, and on my cousin the Marquis, and on all of us!” ”

“ Jean, who was a capital shot, was to join the franc-tierurs.
“I could not keep on singing, you know, when I could be potting the Prussians.”
“As for me,” replied Diane, “I shall keep on singing as a patriotic duty. These Parisians look upon their theatres and operas and music-halls as a barometer. As long as these are open and we sing and dance and play for this great tyrant, Paris, so long will she believe that all is going well, but let us once stop, and she will become panic-stricken. ”

“ In August and September, when disaster followed disaster, and the universe seemed tumbling to pieces, Diane still sang La Marseillaise every night at the music-hall. It seemed to [141] comfort and put new courage into the hearts of her listeners, mostly striplings and weaklings and old men who could not go to fight the Prussians, and could only hate them from afar. The music-hall did a rushing business; many persons skimped their daily bread to save a couple of francs that would take them into the music-hall where Diane with her glorious singing would reanimate their fainting souls. ”

“ At this, Jean, who had said nothing, cast a warning glance at Diane and François.
“I know what you mean by that look, Jean,” said Diane, carefully smoothing her hair. “But prudence is of no use when you are in the tiger’s clutch—or rather the rhinoceros—for this fat, ugly creature looks more like a rhinoceros than a tiger. He means to murder us all, and will do it, no matter how polite we might be. Dear me! I really am not properly dressed for a drive through the streets. ”

“ Diane stood up in the carriage holding her tricolor bouquet, and a great roar of cheering a thousand times greater than she had ever heard before, stormed the air. Diane stood erect, with her head thrown back.
At last there was silence, and Diane, pointing with her white gloved hand straight at Jean [128] not ten feet away, cried in her clear, practised, penetrating voice:
“There is a man who can sing La Marseillaise better than I can. Bring him here, and make him sing it, too.” ”

“ Diane argued with him angrily for half an hour. She had not the slightest intention or even wish to be a grand opera singer, and knew the absurdity of the situation quite as well as Jean. But having, like all women, great powers of deception, she was carefully concealing the true object of her wishes and ambitions—to go to Paris and become a great music hall artist, a profession which she consistently derided and contemned. The simple creature, man, is no match for the complex creature, woman. ”

“ It was like a bird in the snare of the fowler.
“I saw you and followed you,” he said after a while. “You cannot escape me; but why are you so cruel to me?”
“Because I must be,” answered poor Diane, [58] trembling more and more. “Everybody’s past is known some time or other, and when the time comes that the newspaper reporters begin to ask about me, I don’t want to have anything ugly in my past.”
At this, the Marquis, who knew much about women, laughed.
“That is always the way,” he said. “You women think much more of your reputation than you do of your virtue. ”

“ At the end of the week Jean was able to walk about the inner room, while François, [153] though unable to walk, could sit up in the one chair which the cellars possessed.
Still were darkness and silence maintained within the cellars, although there was noise enough outside. The barricade had become almost a fortress, and as the Communards were hemmed in closer and closer, the barricade was extended. The sound of fighting grew nearer and fiercer, the shouts and cries of men, the rattle of ammunition wagons over the stones, the cracking of the mitrailleuse, the crash of bullets ”

“ The love of one man matters little to a woman who is desperately in love with another, but Diane, out of the depths of her own agony, looked into Jean’s eyes and realized that some one else could suffer besides herself. They both forgot that François was changing his clothes on the other side of the piece of canvas and could hear every word. Suddenly François’ head appeared above the canvas partition which was only about six feet high, and with a convenient upturned bucket François, who was a short man, could mount and see over into the next canvas den. ”