English fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, English
Next to the Fat Woman’s hutch was a much larger tent in which the
celebrated Monsieur Figaro, with his wife and seven children, gave
seven or eight times daily a dramatic version of the Passion of Our
Saviour, at which even the priesthood was authorised to assist. The
Figaro family was celebrated from one end of the country to another,
and had been for I do not know how many years--forty or fifty at least.
For there were several generations of Figaros; and if seven charming
and entirely genuine children did indeed still tread the boards, it
was not that the seven original sons and daughters of old M. Figaro
had remained by some miracle perpetually young; but that marrying and
becoming middle-aged they had produced little Figaros of their own,
who in their turn gave rise to more, so that the aged and original M.
Figaro could count among the seven members of his suppositious family
more than one of his great-grandchildren. So celebrated was M. Figaro
that there was even a song about him, of which unfortunately I can
remember only two lines:
“Et le voilà, et le voilà, Fi-ga-ro,
Le plus comique de la Belgique, Fi-ga-ro!”
But on what grounds and in what remote epoch of history he had been
called “Le plus comique de la Belgique,” I was never able to discover.
For the only part I ever saw the venerable old gentleman play was that
of Caiaphas in the _Passion of Our Saviour_, which was one of the
most moving, or at any rate one of the most harrowingly realistic,
performances I ever remember to have seen; so much so, that the voices
of the actors were often drowned by sobs and sometimes by the piercing
screams of a child who thought that they were really and genuinely
driving nails into the graceful young Figaro of the third generation,
who played the part of the Saviour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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