“My good fellow,” she would address him, “your insolence is really too high an interest on my debt. I am tired of the sight of you; go and send the bailiffs. Rather them than your imbecile face.”
Florine gave charming dinners, concerts, and crowded receptions, where the play was very high. Her women friends were all beautiful. Never had an old woman been seen at her parties; she was entirely free from jealousy, which seemed to her a confession of weakness. Among her old acquaintances were Coralie and la Torpille; among those of the day, the Tullias, Euphrasie, the Aquilinas, Mme. du Val-Noble, Mariette;—those women who float through Paris like threads of gossamer in the air, no one knowing whence they come or whither they go; queens today, tomorrow drudges. Her rivals, too, came, actresses and singers, the whole company, in short, of that unique feminine world, so kindly and gracious in its recklessness, whose Bohemian life carries away with its dash, its spirit, its scorn of tomorrow, the men who join the frenzied dance. Though in Florine’s house Bohemianism flourished unchecked to a chorus of gay artists, the mistress had all her wits about her, and could use them as not one of her guests. Secret saturnalia of literature and art were held there side by side with politics and finance. There passion reigned supreme; there temper and the whim of the moment received the reverence which a simple society pays to honor and virtue. There might be seen Blondet, Finot, Étienne Lousteau, her seventh lover, who believed himself to be the first, Félicien Vernou, the journalist, Couture, Bixiou, Rastignac formerly, Claude Vignon, the critic, Nucingen the banker, du Tillet, Conti the composer; in a word, the whole diabolic legion of ferocious egotists in every walk of life. There also came the friends of the singers, dancers, and actresses whom Florine knew.
Every member of this society hated or loved every other member according to circumstances. This house of call, open to celebrities of every kind, was a sort of brothel of wit, a galleys of the mind. Not a guest there but had filched his fortune within the four corners of the law, had worked through ten years of squalor, had strangled two or three love affairs, and had made his mark, whether by a book or a waistcoat, a drama or a carriage and pair. Their time was spent in hatching mischief, in exploring roads to wealth, in ridiculing popular outbreaks, which they had incited the day before, and in studying the fluctuations of the money market. Each man, as he left the house, donned again the livery of his beliefs, which he had cast aside on entering in order to abuse at his ease his own party, and admire the strategy and skill of its opponents, to put in plain words thoughts which men keep to themselves, to practise, in fine, that license of speech which goes with license in action. Paris is the one place in the world where houses of this eclectic sort exist, in which ever taste, every vice, every opinion, finds a welcome, so long as it comes in decent garb.
It remains to be said that Florine is still a second-rate actress. Further, her life is neither an idle nor an enviable one. Many people, deluded by the splendid vantage ground which the theatre gives to a woman, imagine her to live in a perpetual carnival. How many a poor girl, buried in some porter’s lodge or under an attic roof, dreams on her return from the theatre of pearls and diamonds, of dresses decked with gold and rich sashes, and pictures herself, the glitter of the footlights on her hair, applauded, purchased, worshiped, carried off. And not one of them knows the facts of that treadmill existence, how an actress is forced to attend rehearsals under penalty of a fine, to read plays, and perpetually study new parts, at a time when two or three hundred pieces a year are played in Paris. In the course of each performance, Florine changes her dress two or three times, and often she returns to her dressing-room half-dead with exhaustion. Then she has to get rid of the red or white paint with the aid of plentiful cosmetics, and dust the powder out of her hair, if she has heen playing an eighteenth century part. Barely has she time to dine. When she is playing, an actress can neither lace her stays, nor eat, nor talk. For supper again Florine has no time. On returning from a performance, which nowadays is not over till past midnight, she has her toilet for the night to make and orders to give. After going to bed at one or two in the morning, she has to be up in time to revise her parts, to order her dresses, to explain them and try them on; then lunch, read her love-letters, reply to them, transact business with her hired applauders, so that she may be properly greeted on entering and leaving the stage, and, while paying the bill for her triumphs of the past month, order wholesale those of the present. In
