Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part II - III
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At last Marie appeared before the footlights. She
was a success for many and complex reasons. Firstly,
everybody was curious to see a baroness on the stage;
secondly, the middle-classes were sympathetic because they
delighted in the blow dealt to aristocratic prestige by
this divorce ; the bachelors, the sexless, the enemies of
matrimonial slavery, lavished flowers on her ; not to for-
get the friends and relations of the great actor, who were
interested in her because he had been her teacher and was
bringing her out.
After the performance the Baron asked both of us,
and the old lady with whom Marie was living, to supper.
Everybody was charmed with the result and intoxicated
with the success. I was displeased with Marie’s appear-
ance because she had not removed her make-up, and her
hair was still dressed as she had worn it on the stage.
She was no longer the virginal mother with whom I had
fallen in love, but an actress with insolent gestures, bad
manners, boastful, overbearing, behaving with a kind of
offensive foppishness.
In her imagination she had scaled the highest summits
of art, and she dismissed all my remarks, my suggestions,
with a shrug of her shoulders or a condescending, " My
dear, you know nothing about it."
The Baron wore a look of dejection, like an unhappy
lover. But for my presence he would have kissed her.
Under the influence of an incredible quantity of Madeira
he opened his heart to us, and regretted that art, the
divine, should claim so many cruel sacrifices.
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