Cabassu was seen in the Bois, in the enormous and sumptuous caleche beside the favorite gazelle, at the back of the theatre boxes which the Levantine hired, for she went abroad now, revivified by her masseur's treatment and determined to be amused. She liked the theatre, especially farces or melodramas. The apathy of her unwieldy body was minimized in the false glare of the footlights. But she enjoyed Cardailhac's theatre most of all. There the Nabob was at home. From the first manager down to the last box-opener, the whole staff belonged to him. He had a key to the door leading from the corridor to the stage; and the salon attached to his box, decorated in Oriental fashion, with the ceiling hollowed out like a bee-hive, divans upholstered in camel's hair, the gas-jet enclosed in a little Moorish lantern, was admirably adapted for a nap during the tedious _entr'actes_: a delicate compliment from the manager to his partner's wife. Nor had that monkey of a Cardailhac stopped at that: detecting Mademoiselle Afchin's liking for the stage, he had succeeded in persuading her that she possessed an intuitive knowledge of all things pertaining to it, and had ended by asking her to cast a glance in her leisure moments, the glance of an expert, upon such pieces as he sent to her. An excellent way of binding the partnership more firmly. Poor manuscripts in blue or yellow covers, which hope has tied with slender ribbons, ye who take flight swelling with ambition and with dreams, who knows what hands will open you, turn your leaves, what prying fingers will deflower your unknown charm, that shining dust stored up by every new idea? Who passes judgment on you, and who condemns you? Sometimes, before going out to dinner, Jansoulet, on going up to his wife's room, would find her smoking in her easy-chair, with her head thrown back and piles of manuscript by her side, and Cabassu, armed with a blue pencil, reading in his hoarse voice and with his Bourg-Saint-Andeol intonation some dramatic lucubration which he cut and slashed remorselessly at the slightest word of criticism from the lady. "Don't disturb yourselves," the good Nabob's wave of the hand would say, as he entered the room on tiptoe. He would listen and nod his head admiringly as he looked at his wife. "She's an astonishing creature," he would say to himself, for he knew nothing of literature, and in that direction at all events he recognized Mademoiselle Afchin's superiority.