Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/15

Rh Athénée held its sittings I have not the faintest notion; this was, I think, the only time I ever attended one of them. To tell the truth, I have never cared very greatly for meetings of this sort,—where one individual speaks and all the rest listen. The subject spoken of must be exceptionally interesting, or exceptionally unhackneyed; the speaker thereanent must be uncommonly eloquent or uncommonly picturesque, if I am to find much gratification in an unchallenged monologue of this nature, where to differ is to be discourteous, to criticise is an indiscretion.

I have never in all my life succeeded in hearing out an orator or a preacher to the end. There is always an angle somewhere in the discourse that catches hold of me and stops me dead, to follow out a train of thought of my own, while the speaker goes on his way without me. Once left behind, naturally enough I look into the subject from my own individual point of view,—the result being that while our friend is speechifying or preachifying aloud, I am making my own silent discourse a sermon to myself. Arrived at the finish, the two of us are often a hundred miles apart, albeit we started originally from the same point.

It is just the same with stage plays. Except at a first night of a piece written for Arnal, or Grassot, or Ravel, that is to say a work utterly foreign to my customary line and one which I frankly and freely admit myself incapable of emulating, I am the worst first-nighter ever known. If it is a drama of the imagination, no sooner are the characters set on the stage and their general outlines sketched than presto! they cease to be the author's puppets to become mine. By the time the first interval is over, I have appropriated them. Instead of waiting and watching for unexpected developments in Acts II., III., IV. and V., I am finding them places in four Acts of my own composition, making what I can of their idiosyncrasies, turning their originality to advantage for myself. Then if the interval lasts but ten minutes, that is longer than I need to build the house of cards I give them to live in.

Well, it is the same with my theatrical house of cards as with the speech or the sermon I spoke of just now. My house of cards is hardly ever the same as the author's; hence, as I have made a reality out of my dream, so the reality seems a dream to me,—one which I follow out, ever on the alert to raise objections. "But that's not right. Monsieur Arthur; that's not the way, Mademoiselle Honorine; you go too fast, or you go too slow; you turn to the right when you ought to turn to the left; you say yes when you should say no. Upon my word, what mistakes; it's past all bearing!"

As for historical plays the case is still worse. Once I know the title, of course I construct my own piece, the materials of which I bring all ready made with me; then, equally of course, seeing it is constructed with all my characteristic faults, to wit superabundance of detail, stiffness of characterisation, double, treble, quadruple intrigue, it is very, very seldom my play bears the smallest resemblance to the one they are acting on the boards. All this simply makes a first night, which is a pleasure to most people, a veritable torture to me.

Well, my fellow authors are fairly warned. If they invite me to their first nights, they know what to expect.

That evening at the "Athénée" I behaved to Monsieur de Villenave as I do to everybody; only, as he was three parts through with his lecture when we arrived, I began by looking at the man instead of listening to what he was saying.

He was in those days a tall old man of sixty four or sixty five, with fine silvery white hair, a pale complexion and dark flashing eyes. His dress showed that sort of careless carefulness peculiar to busy men who make a regular toilet two or three times in the week at the outside, spending all the rest of their time in dressing-gown and slippers amid the dust of their working-room. His gala costume, with its frilled shirt and white cravat freshly ironed is the work of wife or daughter, whoever looks after the house in fact, whose business it is to make him look respectable. Hence the sort of mute protest the well-brushed coat and neatly pressed trousers seem to enter on these occasions against the everyday, working garments which for their part have a perfect horror of clothes-brush and all such superfluities.

Monsieur de Villenave wore a blue coat with gilt buttons, black trousers, a white waistcoat and white tie.

Verily a curious piece of mechanism our thinking apparatus, an intellectual