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Delage received in his arms, from the top of the carriage steps, the worthy Madame Ravaud, who was getting a little ponderous, and of a sudden, half in jest, half in earnest, he made certain proposals to her. She was no longer young, having been on the stage for half a century. Delage, with his twenty-five years, looked upon her as prodigiously old.
She had also surprised the oldest actress of the theatre, their excellent mother Ravaud, in a corridor, baring, at Ligny's approach, all that was left to her, her magnificent arms, which had been famous for forty years. Fagette, with disgust, and the tip of a gloved finger, called Nanteuil's attention to the scene through which Durville, old Maury and Marie-Claire were struggling.
It was three days now since the latter had reached Paris, without a sou in his pocket, emaciated and enfeebled by the illness that had consigned him to a hospital in Brussels and kept him there two months, and having had the luck to fall in with Captain Ravaud, who had commanded a company in the 106th, he had enlisted at once in his former acquaintance's new company in the 124th.
"Monsieur l'Abbé Mirabelle explained to me in the clearest manner that suicide is an act of despair." But Constantin Marc was inquiring of Pradel with interest, whether Lydie, the little super, was pretty. "You have seen her in La Nuit du 23 octobre; she plays the woman of the people who, in the Plaine de Grenelle, is buying wafers of Madame Ravaud."
"Really," she said, sitting down before her dressing-table, "she makes me boil, that old Doulce, with her morality. Does she think people have forgotten her adventures? If so, she is mistaken. Madame Ravaud tells one of them six days out of seven. Everybody knows that she reduced her husband, the musician, to such a state of exhaustion that one night he tumbled into his cornet.
They were all there, Madame Ravaud, Madame Doulce, Ellen Midi, Duvernet, Herschell, Falempin, Stella, Marie-Claire, Louise Dalle, Fagette, Nanteuil, kneeling, robed in black, like elegiac figures. Some of the women were reading their missals. Some were weeping.
"You, the big woman, the cake-seller, Madame Ravaud, haven't you ever heard the women calling in the Champs-Élysées: 'Eat your fill, ladies! This way for a treat! It is sung. Just learn the tune by to-morrow. And you, drummer-boy, just give me your drum; I'm going to teach you how to beat the roll, confound it!
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