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164 THE CONFESSION OF A FOOL
cold. She realised that her feeble soul had drawn from
me the courage, the boldness necessary to arrive at her
goal, and she wanted to be rid of the troublesome
creditor. She had been stealing my thoughts while she
seemed to scorn them with her contemptuous, " You
know nothing about it, my dear !
"
This uncultured woman, whose only accomplishment was
her fluent French, whose education had been neglected,
who had been brought up in the country, who knew
nothing of literature or the stage, to whom I had given
the first lessons in the correct pronunciation of Swedish,
to whom I had explained the secrets of metrics and
prosody, treated me as if I were an idiot.
I advised her to select for her second appearance in
public, which was to take place shortly, the principal part
in the best melodrama on the repertoire. She refused.
But a few days later she informed me casually that the
idea had occurred to her to choose this particular part.
I analysed it for her, sketched the costumes, drew her
attention to all the points to be made, showed her how to
make her entrances and exits, and pointed out to her the
features which should be specially emphasized.
A secret struggle went on between the Baron and my-
self. He, who stage-managed the performances of the
Royal Guards, instructed the play-acting soldiers, fondly
imagined himself to be better acquainted with theatrical
affairs than I was. Marie valued his so-called hints more
highly ; accepted him as her authority, scorned my sug-
gestions. Oh ! the vileness of his conception of
eesthetics ! He extolled the commonplace, the vulgar, the
banal, because, as he said, it was true nature.
I admitted his arguments as far as modern comedy was
concerned, for here the characters are dejjicted among
the thousand details of everyday life. But his theory
became impossible when applied, for instance, to English
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