“Let me present you to the woman in Paris who knows most about the primitive Italians about whom you were talking to me the other evening.” “Really, sir,” the person to whom I was to be thus linked, an insupportable blue stocking, whose name, if my memory does not deceive me, was Madam de Sermoise, said, “do you admire those idealist masters who are so little appreciated in our days of gross realism? But we shall return to them, and to a noble and lofty art. You have been to Pisa, of course, to Sienna, to San Gemigorano and Perugia?” O sweet little red and golden towns of lovely green Tuscany, which indent with your towers the heights of the slopes planted with vines and olives! O generous artists with whom I lived so long, and whose visions are to me still my soul’s daily bread! Pardon me if I blasphemed your memory and your cult in replying as I did to the odious pedant. I declared to her that her hostess was making fun of her. I told her that I was a member of the grotesquely modern school of art. But my indignation did not last. Madam de Bonnivet had just asked Camille Favier and Bressoré to begin. She gave the signal for the guests to take their seats before the space reserved for the two actors who were to play; and she made Jacques Molan sit by her side, saying loud enough for me to hear— “Every honour shall be shown to the author!” Then followed a few moments of general disturbance of couches and chairs, the occupation of the seats by the women, leaving almost all the men to stand, and the gradual establishment of silence. In the midst of the last of the whispering came the sudden sound of the voices of the two performers, the dialogue, and the discreet applause of the audience of people of leisure; but I hardly noticed the details so did my heart beat, and does still to-day, at the recollection of that long-past hour. Knowing as I did the minutest expressions of Camille’s mobile face, the slightest shades of her gestures, the most tenuous inflections of her voice, I had realized from the first words of the scene that she had lost control of herself. Madam de Bonnivet had seen it too. She affected, while bowing her head at the fine points and being the first to applaud, to lean towards Jacques a little too far, to speak to him in low tones, and render him that public homage which was the simple politeness of an admirer of the fashionable author! But to Camille, the wronged and desperate mistress, the insolence of this attitude was too atrocious, and it was impossible for the actress to bear it without taking her revenge. I believed at first that she would try to humiliate her formidable rival by her success, so much eloquence and passion did she display in the short scene she was acting.