They had to cut it all away with strong scissors, and when the doctor had made a gash from shoulder to temple in this amazing apparatus, he opened out this carapace and found therein an old face, the face of a pale, worn-out, thin, wrinkled man. The shock to those who carried in the young curled mask was so great that no one laughed, no one said a word.
They stared, where it lay on the rush chairs, at this sad face with its closed eyes, besprinkled with white hairs, some of them long, falling from the forehead over his face, others short, sprouting from cheeks and chin, and there beside this poor head—the small, charming, polished mask, the fresh, still smiling mask.
The man came to himself after remaining unconscious for a long time, but he seemed still so feeble, so ill, that the doctor feared some dangerous complication.
“Where do you live?” said he.
The old dancer seemed to search in his memory and then to remember, and he gave the name of a street which no one knew. So they had to ask him again for details of the neighbourhood. He furnished them with infinite pain, with a slowness and indecision that betrayed the disturbance of his mind.
The doctor continued:
“I’ll take you back there myself.”
He had been seized with curiosity to know who this strange mummer was, to see where this amazing mountebank lived.
A cab soon carried them both to the other side of the slope of Montmartre.
It was in a tall house of poverty-stricken aspect, ascended by a shiny staircase, one of those forever unfinished houses, riddled with windows, standing between two amorphous stretches of ground, squalid dens where live a horde of ragged, miserable wretches.
The doctor, clinging to the handrail, a winding wooden rod to which his hand stuck fast, supported the dazed old man, who was now regaining his strength, up to the fourth floor.
The door at which they had knocked opened, and a woman appeared, old too, and clean, with a white nightcap framing a bony face with strongly marked features, the characteristic, broad, good, rough-hewn face of an industrious and faithful woman of the working-class. She cried:
“My God, what’s happened to him?”
When the affair had been explained to her in twenty words, she was reassured, and reassured the doctor himself by telling him that this was by no means the first of such adventures that had happened.
“He must go to bed, sir, that’s all, he’ll sleep, and next day there’ll be nothing to show for it.”
The doctor answered:
“But he can hardly speak.”
“Oh, it’s nothing, he’s a little drunk, nothing else. He ate no dinner so that he should be supple, and then he drank two absinths to liven himself up. The absinth, you know, revives his legs, but it takes away his wits and his words. He’s not of an age now to dance as he does. No, indeed, I’ve lost all hope of him ever getting any sense.”
The doctor, surprised, insisted:
“But why does he dance like that, old as he is?”
She shrugged her shoulders; she was flushed with the anger that was slowly rousing in her.
“Oh, yes, why! To tell the truth, it’s so that people will think he’s young under his mask, so that the women will still take him for a gay dog and whisper nasty things in his ear, so that he can rub himself against their skin, all their dirty skins with their scents and their powder and their pomades. Oh, it’s a nasty business! Well, I’ve had a life of it, I have, sir, for the forty years it’s been going on. … But he must be got to bed first so he doesn’t take any harm. Would it be too much trouble to you to give me a hand? When he’s like that, I can’t manage by myself.”
The old man was sitting on the bed, with a drunken look, his long white hair fallen over his face.
His companion regarded him with pitying, angry eyes. She went on:
“Look what a fine face he has for his age, and he must go and disguise himself like a worthless scamp so that people will think he’s young. If it’s not a pity! He really has a fine face, sir! Wait, I’ll show it to you before we put him to bed.”
She went towards a table on which was the hand basin, the water jug, soap, comb and brush. She took the brush, then returned to the bed and, lifting the old drunkard’s tangled head of hair, in the twinkling of an eye she gave him the face of a painter’s model, with long curls falling on his neck. Then, stepping back to contemplate him:
“He really is handsome for his age, isn’t he?”
“Very handsome,” declared the doctor, who was beginning to find it very amusing.
She added:
“And if you had known him when he was twenty-five years old! But we must put him to bed, or else his absinths will upset him in his stomach. Now, sir, will you draw off his sleeve? … higher … that’s it … good … the breeches now … wait, I’ll take off his shoes … that’s better. … Now, hold him up while I turn down the bed … there … lay him down … if you think he’ll disturb himself shortly to make room for me, you’re mistaken. I must find my corner, anywhere, anyhow. He doesn’t worry about it. There, you gay spark, you!”
As soon as he felt himself between his bedclothes, the good man shut his eyes, reopened them, shut them
