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Negresses went and came, slowly removing their mistress's coffee, the favourite gazelle was licking the dregs of a cup which its delicate muzzle had overturned on the carpet, while seated at the foot of the bed with a touching familiarity, the melancholy Cabassu was reading aloud to madame a drama in verse which Cardailhac was shortly going to produce.
"She had the instinct of the stage," as Cardailhac used to say; but, on the other hand, the maternal instinct was wanting in her.
In the afternoon of the Thursday, towards three o'clock, he regained complete consciousness, and recognising Monpavon, Cardailhac, and two or three other intimate friends, he smiled to them, and betrayed in a sentence his only anxiety: "What do they say about it in Paris?"
The disturbance was quickly appeased, thanks to our arrival, thanks also to the wise words of M. Barreau, a middle-aged man, sedate and majestic, with a manner resembling my own. He is the Nabob's cook, a former chef of the Cafe Anglais, whom Cardailhac, the manager of the Nouveautes, has procured for his friend.
A week later I landed at Tunis with half a louis in my pocket, and I came back to-day with twenty-five millions!" An electric shock passed round the table; there was a gleam in every eye, even in those of the servants. Cardailhac said, "Phew!" Monpavon's nose descended to common humanity.
Cardailhac was especially bent upon justifying his title of "manager of the Nouveautés," and since the Nabob's millions had been behind the undertaking, he had striven to give the frequenters of the boulevard some dazzling surprises. That of this evening surpassed them all: the play was in verse and virtuous. A virtuous play!
They laid him on a couch in the property room, Paul de Géry by his side with a physician and two attendants who were eager to help. Cardailhac, who was very busy with the performance, had promised to come and see how he was getting on, "in a moment, after the fifth act."
Nor had that monkey of a Cardailhac stopped at that: detecting Mademoiselle Afchin's liking for the stage, he had succeeded in persuading her that she possessed an intuitive knowledge of all things pertaining to it, and had ended by asking her to cast a glance in her leisure moments, the glance of an expert, upon such pieces as he sent to her.
He is the Nabob's cook, formerly chef at the Café Anglais, and M. Cardailhac, manager of the Nouveautés, secured him for his friend. To see him in his black coat and white cravat, with his handsome, full, clean-shaven face, you would take him for one of the great functionaries of the Empire.
But Cardailhac was too busy superintending the order and the progress of the procession to give way to the least emotion, which would, besides, have been foreign to his nature. Old Monpavon, stricken to the heart, would have considered the least bending of his linen cuirass and of his tall figure a piece of deplorably bad taste, totally unworthy of his illustrious friend.
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