"Do you suppose that is easy in our profession? To-morrow I have a rehearsal in the green-room, and one on the stage, and I have to try on a gown, while to-night I am acting. For more than a year now I've been leading that sort of life." CHAPTER X Under the great void reserved by the height of the roof for the upward flight of prayers the motley crowd of human beings was huddled together like a flock of sheep. They were all there, at the foot of the catafalque surrounded by lights and covered with flowers, Durville, old Maury, Delage, Vicar, Destree, Leon Clim, Valrosche, Aman, Regnard, Pradel, Romilly, and Marchegeay, the manager. 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. All of them brought to the coffin of their comrade at least the tribute of their heavy eyes and their faces pallid from the cold of the morning. Journalists, actors, playwrights, whole families of those artisans who gain their living by the theatre, and a crowd of curious onlookers filled the nave. The choristers were uttering the mournful cries of the _Kyrie eleison_; the priest kissed the altar; turned towards the people and said: _"Dominus vobiscum."_ Romilly; taking in the crowd at a glance, remarked "Chevalier has a full house." "Just look at that Louise Dalle," said Fagette. "To look as though she's in mourning, she has put on a black mackintosh!" A little to the back of the church, with Pradel and Constantin Marc, Dr. Trublet was, in subdued tones, according to his habit, delivering his moral homilies. "Observe," he said, "that they are lighting, on the altar and about the coffin, in the guise of wax candles, diminutive night-lights mounted on billiard cues, and are thereby making an offering of lamp oil instead of virgin wax to the Lord. The pious men who dwell in the sanctuary have at all times been proved to defraud their God by these little deceptions. This observation is not my own; it is, I believe, Renan's." The celebrant, standing on the epistle side of the altar, was reciting in a low voice: _"Nolumus autem vos ignorare fratres de dormientibus, ut non contrisemimi, sicut et caeteri qui spem non habent."_ "Who is taking the part of Florentin?" inquired Durville of Romilly. "Regnard: he'll be no worse in it than Chevalier." Pradel plucked Trublet by the sleeve, and said: "Dr. Socrates, I beg you to tell me whether as a scientific man, as a physiologist, you see any serious objections to the immortality of the soul?" He asked the question as a busy and practical man in need of personal information.