I

“LOOK HERE,LITTLE one,” said Ginginet, stretched upon the urine-colored velvet of the bench, “you haven’t a bad voice, you are pretty, and you have a certain stage presence, but that’s not all. Listen to me. Its an old ham, a roustabout of the provinces and abroad, who is talking to you, an old wolf of the stage, as steady on the boards as a sailor on the sea. Well! You’re not popular enough yet with the mob! That will come, little dear, but you’re not quite there yet with your hips, you don’t come in quite right on theboom of the bass-drum. Look here, look at me, I’ve got legs like a pair of warped tweezers, arms like vine-stalks; when I open my mouth its like the frog of a wine-vat, and I am just about as light on my feet as a ton of bricks, but bingo! when the cymbal clashes, I shake a leg, rasp out the last word of the stanza, gargle a false note, and there you are; I’ve got the public in the palm of my hand. That’s what you’ve got to do. Come on, warble your ditty, and I’ll show you the fine points as you go along. One, two, three, attention, your daddy’s got his auricular tube open, your daddy’s listening.”

“Here, Mademoiselle Marthe, here’s a letter which the door-woman told me to hand you,” said a big girl with a burr and a snivel in her voice.

“Ah! That’s fine,” cried the young one. “Look here, Ginginet, what I’ve just received. Nice, isn’t it?”

The comedian unfolded the paper and the corners of his lips mounted to the flaps of his nose, revealing gums smeared with red and producing a crack in the mask of rouge and powder with which his face was varnished.

“It’s in verse!” he exclaimed, visibly alarmed. “In other words, the one who sends it is some fellow without a sou. A well-to-do-gentleman doesn’t send verse!”

The players had reassembled during this conversation. It was as cold as the north-pole that night, and the back-stage corridors, with their drafts of air, were glacial. All the actors were huddled about a coke fire that flamed in the chimney.

“What’s that?” inquired an actress, insolentlydécolletée from head to foot.

“Hear ye,” said Ginginet, and he read, amid general attention, the following sonnet:

TO A SINGER

A fife thatsqualls and hisses with dry throat;
Sniffling bassoon; an old man who tries to spit
His teeth down the trombone’s neck; the violin?
It Sounds like an ancient rebeck’s rasping note.

A mighty flageolet—on its beak you dote;
A surly cornet, a bass-drum like to split:
Such is, with a conductor very fit—
Tun-bellied, scrofulous, an ugly bloat—

The theatre-orchestra, which holds in check
A lady apt for any amorous list:
On you, my only love, my sole delight, this fleck.

Each night you follow— ’tisyour infamous duty;
Eyes shut, arms down and mouth made to be kissed,
I see you smile on cads, O Queen of Beauty!

“And it isn’t signed!”

“Listen, Ginginet, that’s what you call handing the orchestra leader a sweet one; ought to show him those vers-s-es; that will take him down a peg, the old catgut-scraper!”

“Come, ladies, on the stage,” cried a gentleman clad in a black hat and a blue macfarlane. “Take your places, the overture is beginning!”

The women arose, tossed cloaks over their nude shoulders, shook themselves with a collective shiver — and, followed by the men, who had interrupted their pipes or their bezique game, filed through the little door which gave access to the stage by way of the wings.

The fireman on duty was at his post, and although he was half-dead with cold, there were flames in his eyes when he saw what was under the petticoats of some of the danseuses scattered through this revue. The stage manager gave three taps, and the curtain slowly rose,