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Updated: May 14, 2025
Challenged thus, however, and despite the ominous manner in which the bourgeois element in the audience had responded to Scaramouche's appeal to its passions, despite the attempts made by Chabrillane to restrain him, the Marquis swept aside the curtain at the side of the box, and suddenly showed himself, pale but self-contained and scornful as he surveyed first the daring Scaramouche and then those others who at sight of him had given tongue to their hostility.
"Nothing," said Leandre. There was a gasp from the audience, audible in the wings, and then swiftly followed Scaramouche's next question: "True. Alas! But what should it be?" "Everything," said Leandre. The audience roared its acclamations, the more violent because of the unexpectedness of that reply. "True again," said Scaramouche.
But before she could find an answer of sufficient venom, her father was rating her soundly for her stupidity the more soundly because himself he had been deceived by Scaramouche's supreme acting. Scaramouche's success in the first act was more than confirmed as the performance proceeded. Completely master of himself by now, and stimulated as only success can stimulate, he warmed to his work.
"But you don't mean that you are leaving us?" cried Polichinelle in alarm, whilst Rhodomont's sudden stare asked the same question. Scaramouche's shrug was eloquent. Polichinelle ran on gloomily: "Of course it was to have been foreseen. But why should you be the one to go?
He placed a hand upon Scaramouche's shoulder, and surveyed him with a smile whose oiliness not even his red paint and colossal false nose could dissemble. "And what have you to say to me now?" he asked him. "Was I wrong when I assured you that you would succeed? Do you think I have followed my fortunes in the theatre for a lifetime without knowing a born actor when I see one?
It was a mere piece of theatricality, such as it was not in Scaramouche's nature to forgo. "I have been detained by an engagement of a pressing nature. I bring you also the excuses of M. de Chabrillane. He, unfortunately, will be permanently absent from this Assembly in future." The silence was complete. Andre-Louis sat down.
A chair was thrust forward. He crushed Scaramouche down into it. "Let us look at this foot of yours." Heedless of Scaramouche's howls of pain, he swept away shoe and stocking. "What ails it?" he asked, staring. "Nothing that I can see." He seized it, heel in one hand, instep in the other, and gyrated it. Scaramouche screamed in agony, until Climene caught Binet's arm and made him stop.
Do you want to see this pretty Marquis torn limb from limb? I might afford you the spectacle." "What?" Leandre stared, wondering was this another of Scaramouche's cynicisms. "It isn't really difficult provided I have aid. I require only a little. Will you lend it me?" "Anything you ask," Leandre exploded. "My life if you require it." Andre-Louis took his arm again. "Let us walk," he said.
M. Binet listened desperately for the roar of laughter that usually greeted the entrance of Scaramouche, and his dismay increased when it did not come. And then he became conscious of something alarmingly unusual in Scaramouche's manner. The sibilant foreign accent was there, but none of the broad boisterousness their audiences had loved. He wrung his hands in despair. "It is all over!" he said.
"Name of a name," he groaned to the rather scared members of the company assembled there, "what will happen when they discover that he isn't acting?" But they never did discover it. Scaramouche's bewildered paralysis lasted but a few seconds. He realized that he was being laughed at, and remembered that his Scaramouche was a creature to be laughed with, and not at.
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