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They laughed and smoked and made a great noise; the manager would come to greet his sleeping partner. But on this evening there was nobody. And the absence of Cardailhac, with his keen nose for success, signified fully to Jansoulet the measure of his disgrace. "What have I done? Why will Paris have no more of me?"
There was the manager of the theatre in which the Nabob was a sleeping partner, Cardailhac, almost as renowned for his wit as for his failures, that wonderful carver, who would prepare one of his bons mots as he detached the limbs of a partridge, and deposit it with a wing in the plate that was handed him.
"Hurrah, hurrah for the Bey!" This was the signal for the first bands to begin, the choral societies started in their turn, and the noise growing step by step, the road from Giffas to Saint-Romans was nothing but an uninterrupted bellow. Cardailhac and all the gentlemen, Jansoulet himself, leant in vain out of the windows making desperate signs, "That will do! That's enough!"
On Thursday afternoon, about three o'clock, he recovered consciousness completely, and, recognizing Monpavon, Cardailhac and two or three other close friends, smiled at them and betrayed in a word his sole preoccupation: "What do people say of this in Paris?" This Mora was the most brilliant incarnation of the Empire.
Naught could be heard save the tinkling bells of the mules as they ambled slowly along, the measured, heavy tread, through the burning dust, of the bands of singers whom Cardailhac stationed at intervals in the procession, and from time to time, in the double, swarming line of human beings that bordered the road as far as the eye could see, a call, the voices of children, the cry of a peddler of fresh water, the inevitable accompaniment of all open-air fêtes in the South.
The women were in a great majority, as Cardailhac thought that for a Bey the play was of little consequence, and that all that was needful was to have catchy tunes in pretty mouths, to show fine arms and shapely legs in the easy costume of light opera.
Parisian, moreover, a dandy to the finger tips, and, as he himself was wont to boast, "with not one particle of superstition in his whole body," a characteristic which permitted him to give very piquant details concerning the ladies of his theatre to Brahim Bey who listened to him as one turns over the pages of a naughty book and to talk theology to the young priest who was his nearest neighbour, a curate of some little southern village, lean and with a complexion sunburnt till it matched the cloth of his cassock in colour, with fiery patches above the cheek-bones, and the pointed, forward-pushing nose of the ambitious man, who would remark to Cardailhac very loudly, in a tone of protection and sacerdotal authority: "We are quite pleased with M. Guizot.
The Nabob advanced amid an inexplicable solitude of desertion to the first floor, where at last he heard a voice he knew, that of Cardailhac, who was dictating names, and the scratching of pens over paper. The clever stage-manager of the festivities in honour of the Bey was organizing with the same ardour the funeral pomps of the Duc de Mora. What activity!
On the crowded stage, where scene-shifters and machinists are running hither and thither, jostling one another in the soft, snowy light from the wings, soon to give place, when the curtain rises, to the brilliant light from the theatre, Cardailhac in black coat and white cravat, his hat cocked over one ear, casts a last glance over the arrangement of the scenery, hastens the workmen, compliments the ingénue, humming a tune the while, radiant and superb.
Cardailhac is there in his dress-coat and white tie, his opera hat on one side, giving a final glance to the arrangement of the scenery, hurrying the workmen, complimenting the ingenue who is waiting dressed and ready, beaming, humming an air, looking superb. To see him no one would ever guess the terrible worries which distract him.
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