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Updated: July 9, 2025
You know Monsieur de Géry he, with my old friend Cardailhac, whom I introduce to you, make up the first batch. But others are coming. Prepare for a terrible how-d'ye-do. We receive the bey in four days." "The bey again!" said the good woman in dismay. "I thought he was dead." Jansoulet and his guests could but laugh at her comical alarm, heightened by her Southern accent.
"But there's another, mamma. There are always beys luckily for me, sapristi! But don't you be afraid. You won't have so much trouble on your hands. Friend Cardailhac has undertaken to look after things. We're going to have some superb fêtes. Meanwhile give us some dinner quick, and show us our rooms. Our Parisian friends are tired out."
But the borrowers are waiting for him to pass. The most prompt, the most adroit, is Cardailhac, the manager, who lays hold of him and bears him off into a side-room. "Let us have a little talk, old friend. I must explain to you the situation of affairs in connection with our theatre."
One heard too distinctly the tinkling mule-bells, the heavy steps in the dust of the band of singers whom Cardailhac was placing at regular distances in the seething human hedge which bordered the road and was lost in the distance; a sudden call, children's voices, and the cry of the water-seller, that necessary accompaniment of all open-air festivals in the Midi.
He had had a good deal of trouble to get it read by Cardailhac, who, the moment he saw its "short lines," as he called verse, wished to send the manuscript to the Levantine and her masseur, as he was wont to do in the case of all beginners in the writing of drama. But Paul was careful not to refer to his own intervention.
The frame was so beautiful, the general outlook so superb, that the obtrusive, tasteless luxury melted away, disappeared even to the most sensitive eye. "There's something to work with," said Cardailhac the manager, with his monocle at his eye, his hat on one side, already planning his stage-setting.
In the sumptuous dining-room, their elbows on the table, full of meat and drink, they planned and discussed. Cardailhac, who had great ideas, had already his plan complete. "First of all, you give me carte-blanche, don't you, Nabob? Carte-blanche, old fellow, and make that fat Hemerlingue burst with envy." Then the manager explained his scheme.
Early the next morning the uproar began with the arrival of the actors and actresses, an avalanche of caps, chignons, high boots, short petticoats, affected screams, veils floating over the fresh coats of rouge; the women were in a large majority, Cardailhac having reflected that, where a bey was concerned, the performance was of little consequence, that one need only emit false notes from pretty lips, show lovely arms and well-turned legs in the free-and-easy négligé of the operetta.
Warned by that signal, the first flourishes rang out, the singing societies struck up in their turn, and as the noise increased from point to point, the road from Giffas to Saint-Romans was naught but one long, unbroken wave of sound. In vain did Cardailhac, all the gentlemen, Jansoulet himself, lean out of the windows and make desperate signs: "Enough! enough!"
Here one could enjoy a siesta during rather long intervals between the acts; a gallant attention on the part of the manager to the wife of his partner. Nor did that ape of a Cardailhac stop at this.
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