My Climax

I

OCTOBER 1904 to July 1905 represented for me a succession of revelations, each more instructive and important than the last. This was without doubt the crucial year of my life.

For several months things had been going from bad to worse. Not that I was bored: quite the contrary. Life was a little too interesting. The fun was bound not to last.

I must have been going through what is called a bad period, for I was very happy. We all know that to other people our happiness is rather disquieting, something not entirely normal. What irritated me, now and then to the point of ruining my fun, was that the more likable I grew in the eyes of people I scarcely knew, the more antipathetic I became for people I knew very well.

It is a fact that I was moving in frivolous circles, and that in such circles one soon acquires a superficial manner and an elliptical vocabulary which exasperate those who are both too old and too busy to join in one’s fun. Not that I intend to defend the world of frivolity. But from the fact that it has its laws, its customs, its fashions, its manners, — its bad manners, — as well as its own language, I incline to believe that it may be better to have known and observed it in one’s youth than to deny blindly that it exists. After all, it is only one more school — at least so far as it partakes of misery and unhappiness. And it really is a world, a world apart, and one lacking in neither wit nor heart. What you may find harder to credit is that it is something of a closed world. Not everybody is allowed in. It might be compared to a club, or a circle; perhaps a vicious circle, since it is equally hard to get out of. And since I am convinced that, once out of it, one never goes back into it, there is perhaps some virtue in having swung round it at the age of twenty, rather than to run the risk of a tardy curiosity and regret later on.

I can very well hear a son saying to his father, ‘ If you deprived yourself of it, Papa, your lack of experience may disqualify you as judge. And if you did not deprive yourself of it, why do you want me to do so?’

For my part, when I think of it I am delighted to have made the rounds at the age of eighteen years.

At any rate, after the summer of 1904, I changed overnight. Farewell, pleasures; hail, joys . . . and sorrows, too.

In October of that year Eugène Demolder, the author (almost unknown) of an admirable book (almost unread), La Route d’Émeraude, guided my father and me through the museums of Holland.

What he said was, ‘Come: I want to show you some pictures.’ And this man, this little butterball of a man, this Belgian who was all wit and talent and heart, who had married the daughter of Félicien Rops and looked like a person out of Manet’s Bon Bock, led us on a marvelous tour, for he knew how a museum should be shown.

I can see him in my room, at The Hague, come to wake me in the morning and sitting on the foot of my bed; and I can still hear his voice.

‘This morning you will see Paul Potter’s little bull, Vermeer’s view of Delft, and perhaps the most beautiful of the Holbeins. That will be all for today. It will be more than enough. And you are going to promise that you will not try to look at any other pictures. We’ll see the others some other time. You will be two hours with the three pictures, and they will be with you all your life. And nows, let me tell you who they were — Potter, and Vermeer, and Holbein.’

How right he was! A man can read all Baudelaire’s poems in a single night, — though he should n’t, — but as they are there to be reread the next day, it does n’t so much matter. But the man who boasts that he has seen two hundred pictures in a morning is a man who never looked at the pictures he saw. Demolder knew the important place that painting can and should take in a man’s life. He knew that in certain moments of sadness the memory of a face painted by Memling can be as soothing and comforting as the murmuring of ten lines of Ronsard under one’s breath. He showed us only three or four masterpieces each day, but he showed them so intelligently that we got them by heart and never forgot them. It is because of them that I go back to Holland every year.

II

‘ You are going to have a part in Donnay’s play,’ announced my father.

‘Really!’

’Yes. Your part is not long: ten lines. But you’ll be able to read them well, for they are charming.’

I could n’t believe my ears! I was going to act; I was going to act in my father’s theatre! I was going to make a name!

‘You will play under the name of Lorcey.’

‘Why?’

‘Because.’

Well, maybe he was right. It was certainly safer. And did n’t I say I wanted to make my name? Why not make the name of Lorcey? The main thing was to be acting and earning one’s living.

‘ You ’ll be paid three hundred francs a month.’

‘Three hundred?’

‘Yes, it’s good pay.’

I could live on it. Not as I lived at home. But since I was living at home anyway . . .

‘Do I have a scene with you?’

‘No, with Guy.’

‘Oh.’

Guy was an excellent actor, but I should have preferred to play with my father. As a matter of fact, I did play with my father, only it was Guy who was playing my father. To say that I was a success would be too much. To say that I was not would be inaccurate. Nobody said, ‘Well, well!’ Instead: ‘That Guitry is really extraordinary. He’d let anybody into his company.’

After L’Escalade my father produced Jules Lemaître’s enchanting La Massière. The cast was remarkable — Anna Judic, Marthe Brandes, and my father. It was the story of a father, a famous man, in disagreement with his son. For one moment there was a notion that I might play the son. I learned the part, but it was Maury who played it. Fortunately for the play! But I was cruelly disappointed and I hated that charming Maury.

Happily, La Massière did not fill the whole evening, and my father proposed to Lemaître to do his one-act play in verse, La Bonne Héléne, as a curtain raiser. This also was very well cast, with Arquillière, Noizcu.x, the beautiful Nelly Cormon, and that exquisite actress, Marthe Ritter. As for me, I played Paris. I have no idea how I played it, but I had a magnificent costume. A photograph was the cause of the trouble I got into one night. Courteline himself had a hand in it.

The boots I wore took hours to lace up. Meanwhile, I wanted a souvenir of this costume of which I was so proud. My intimate friend, Nadar, a son of the eminent photographer and himself a photographer of eminence, said to me, ‘Come round one Sunday after the matinée. I’ll photograph you; you’ll dine at the house; and you ’ll be dressed and ready for the evening performance.’ The idea was not bad, and we carried it out.

Now, Courteline’s La Conversion d’Alceste had just appeared, and the author had sent a copy to Nadar. Over the coffee, I was asked to read it aloud. It was eight o’clock; but I was dressed, and therefore I had the time. Time passes quickly when you read a play of Courteline’s. I let it pass. Suddenly the half hour struck and I left Nadar’s on the run, my wig in my helmet and my helmet under my arm. There was n’t a cab to be seen in the rue d’Anjou, and the people I crossed must have wondered where that gladiator could be running. I remember squabbling with an old lady over a prehistoric four-wheeler at the corner of the rue des Mathurins and the rue Tronchet.

‘I must be at the barracks before nine o’clock. Have pity, madame!’

She had pity, and did not seem to be at all astonished by the new uniform of the French infantry.

It was ten to nine when I reached the Renaissance. I was twenty minutes late. The theatre staff, scattered along the rue de Bondy, raised their arms to heaven when they saw me.

‘I warn you that your father is in a state,’ one of them said.

‘The audience has been stamping for ten minutes,’ said another.

I took the stairs four at a time. The three knocks came, announcing that the curtain was about to go up. Heavens! I had forgotten my wig in the cab. That wig was enormous, and without it my head went so deep into the helmet that both eyes and ears were lost in it. Dranem could come on that way and be funny; I could n’t.

The curtain rose and I came on in the helmet. The audience was properly astonished, particularly as Helen welcomed me with the words, ‘Here comes my beautiful Paris!’ The rest of the cast, who had had no warning, took one look at me and burst into laughter. None of them could speak a line, with the exception of Noizeux, who was able to ‘ad lib’: ‘There is something different about Paris to-night.’ At first the audience gave us the benefit of the doubt and sat smiling pleasantly. Then it became restless. Soon it grew angry over not having been let into the joke. Finally it began to stamp in unison.

When my scene was ended I went off and someone led me to the call board. There, under ‘Remarks,’ my father had written: ‘Monsieur Lorcey, fined one hundred francs for arriving twenty minutes late and going on without wig in order to make the cast laugh.’

I had arrived late and I had played without a wig, it was true; but I was earning ten francs a day, and a fine of one hundred francs seemed to me too much. I told my father so. He was furious and refused to listen. I must have been very blundering, for he cut me off with, ‘You can take it or leave it.’ I left it.

A few hours later I was in the train on the way to Tamaris, near Toulon, to stay with Alphonse Allais. And this — yes, this is why my father and I went for thirteen years without seeing each other.

III

In April 1905, I was again in Paris without a sou in my pocket, but I had visited the museums of Holland, I had devoured Demolder’s library, I had seen how Alfred Jarry lived, I had acted in comedy, — badly, but acted, — I had spent four weeks with Alphonse Allais, and I had fallen in love with the writings of Jules Renard.

Let me be frank. I had from childhood thumbed the pages of a good many books; I had read a few, but had never reread one. Literature seemed to me a thing particularly dull. When I was a child Jules Verne did not appeal to me, nor did Alexandre Dumas. All novels seemed to me too long and I simply could not become interested in the events in which fictional characters were concerned. I loved reflections, maxims, and the form of literature known as pensées — and verse. But I had an unfortunate mania, which was that I wanted to get by heart all the poetry I liked. This is why I read poetry; it is also why I have a good deal of it by heart.

As for the classics, I avow to my shame that I had no taste for them. They had too often been the cause of my punishment; and besides, how illogical you were, my dear teachers! You kept me in class after hours because I had not learned a given fable by le Bonhomme,¹ and when I did n’t know where Bermuda was you ordered me peremptorily to copy out Le Chêne et le Roseau twenty times. In French class it was a crime not to know the poem; in geography class it was a punishment to copy it out. It seems to me you should have made up your minds one way or the other.

My first loves were Jules Renard, Laurent Tailhade, and Alphonse Allais. My earliest writing showed this rather painfully. The influence was only too evident. Thereafter, without in the least meaning to, I did the contrary to what most people do. As one goes up a river towards its source, so I went from Jules Renard back to Montaigne. I traversed the same road as Renard, but in the opposite direction.

Several months after my return to Paris I was handed a number of brochures containing the plays in which I was to appear during the summer season at Saint-Valery-en-Caux, and among them I found Henry Becque’s Amoureuse and La Parisienne. I had seen Amoureuse, but I did not know La Parisienne at all. Both plays I had heard spoken of — and had spoken of them impudently myself. I knew they were masterpieces, but out of guilty and incomprehensible negligence I had never read either. It took three readings of La Parisienne to make me understand its importance. At first I thought it the work of a remarkable man, but a farce that had missed fire. When I read it a second time the power of the dialogue and its veracity became clear to me. You can imagine what I felt on the third reading.

Well, there I was, in June 1905, making my first appearance at the Casino in Saint-Valery-en-Caux. I was to play Simpson in La Parisienne and the lead in Les Joies du Foyer, — what lack of sense! — but I was not to play in Amoureuse. I was to have one crime less on my conscience. But it was in Le Député de Bombignac, an excellent old comedy by Alexandre Bisson, that I gave the full measure of my capacity.

My part in Bombignac was the Vicomte de Morard. I was to come on in the middle of act one, announced by a footman and greeted by a very flattering ‘Ah!’ from everybody on stage. Then, having bowed to them all, I was to say, verbatim, the following; ‘ Really, ladies, I scarcely know how to thank you for so cordial a welcome. I have just spent three weeks at Poitiers with an aged uncle, and if my call is somewhat matutinal it is because I was in great haste to see Raymond again and shake him by the hand.’

A terrible and interminable opening speech. Only an author who stuttered could ask others to make such a speech. As it happens, I did not make it. God knows why, I had stuck on my face a pair of mustachios and a small beard. I was wearing white linen trousers which the laundry had already shrunk excessively. One of my gloves had got lost, and just as I was about to go on my mustachios came loose, so that I pulled them off — forgetting the beard. I looked like a bartender in an old Nevada print.

‘ Monsieur le vicomte de Morard!‘

I was announced and I came on as I have described myself. Instead of the flattering ‘Ah!’ directed in the script I was greeted by a chortle from the troupe which found an immediate echo in the audience. I lost my nerve. When I tried to say the mouth-filling ‘I scarcely know how to thank you,’ and so forth, I did not mumble it, I did not splutter it — I made a complete hash of it. I seemed to be speaking no known language. The audience did the only thing there was to do, the logical thing: it broke into a roar of laughter and followed that by stamping with happy violence.

I felt lost, saddened, in bits.

Between the acts Edmond Sée, André Picard, and other friends came back to my dressing room to tell me how wrong I was to permit myself to be overcome by stage fright and how stupid I was to take things so seriously. They bucked me up a little, but not much.

Presumably nothing happened in the second act, for I remember nothing about it. But in the third act my misfortunes exceeded my worst fears. I was on stage, seated. I was to rise, run to a window, open the window, lean out, then turn my head and say, ‘A carriage has just stopped before the steps of the chateau!’ From the rise of the curtain I had surprised the audience agreeably by taking several cues without muffing them. Confidence was reborn in me. I noticed in all my ‘business’ a delightful ease and grace which induced in me the firm expectancy of making handsome reparation by the end of the act. How far I was from suspecting what was about to happen! When the moment came for me to go to the window, open it, and lean out — I went resolutely. How could I know that the back wall of the set was glued to the wall of the building? I ran my head smack into the wall, was thrown back, caught my heel in the rug, and measured my length on the floor.

Well — despite, or perhaps because of, the pain I felt, I wanted to be the first to laugh. I laughed like a fool and no power on earth could have prevented me from taking the thing this way. I had no notion what was to become of me, but I was very sure I should never be an actor. The thought induced in me a sort of raging joy. I felt myself delivered of an immense burden. I was never again to know the constant fear that I might tarnish the brilliance of the name I bore.

IV

The next day my contract was annulled. On my way home, I stopped and bought some drawing paper and pencils. When I got home I sat down with my pencils and my paper before me and wondered what sketches I should make.

Renard, Capus, Donnay, Tristan Bernard, my father — all of them were sketched. They were all more or less good likenesses, but the best was that of my father, as was natural. Thinking of him, trying to reassemble his features, his look, the idea suddenly came to me of writing a play for him. Mind you, it was not an idea for a play, it was the idea of a play for him. Pure madness, since we had not spoken or communicated for six months; but it was a pretty dream, though it took all of thirteen years for it to come true, when I wrote and he played Pasteur. I believe I may say that my first five or six plays were written with him in mind. Those that succeeded owe a great deal to him, since he inspired them; and those that failed might have been saved had he played in them.

I folded my drawing paper in eight, and, without realizing the implications of the act, I began to write on this octavo a violent scene between a man forty years old and his mistress: the woman is importunate and the man has had enough of her. I had witnessed such a scene in my childhood, and it has never gone from my memory. Horribly cruel words were spoken by two people who ten minutes before seemed still to adore each other: it was bewildering. Such a thing still bewilders me.

I did not try to write my scene in the manner of Porto-Riche, or of Renard, or of anybody else. I was trying to remember all the things I had heard, making a deliberate effort to forget all those I had read. On the other hand, I said to myself continually, ‘Careful! Renard has got to like this . . . and Porto-Riche must not dislike it.’ It is no tribute to my memory that I can recall this, for what I said to myself that day I have never stopped repeating to myself.

Two hours later I had finished the first act of Nono.

Edmond Sée had the villa next to mine. We had chopped out a gap in the hedge by way of a short cut between our two houses. What had happened at the Casino the night before upset him for my sake, and he came across to ask me what I was going to do now.

‘What am I going to do? I don’t know. However, here is what I’ve done — an act.’

He asked me to read it to him. May I say that I should have read it to him anyway ? And there is another thing you must let me say, for I shall never forget it: he liked that act very much. I never expected to hear such encouraging things as he said. He has often spoken of that reading, and in terms which have touched me infinitely. His memory refreshing my own, our conversation remains very clear in my mind. When he counseled me not to stop halfway, but to go on immediately, I told him that I firmly intended to write other plays.

‘Before you write others you must finish this one.’

I looked at him open-mouthed. He went on: —

‘Is n’t this a play in three acts?’

‘ Nono? ’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course it is.’

’That’s what I say. Before you write others you must write acts two and three of this play.’

‘Naturally.’

I said, ‘Naturally,’ and I had said, ‘Of course’; but the truth was that there had been no ‘naturally’ about it one second before. To my mind, Nono was finished; it was a one-act play, not the first act of a play. But I said, ‘Of course’ — and I wrote the other acts.

I owe Edmond Sée a handsome candle, almost a taper.

I ask permission to say that Nono was a very great success. Do not mind:

I shall now tell you what a flop was La Clef the following year.

La Clef was a comedy in four acts which I had written for Réjane and which she had read with enthusiasm. Rehearsals took place in an atmosphere of the greatest good humor and we were looking forward to the opening night in a spirit of gay confidence.

It was a disaster.

The first act went badly. The second went very badly — despite one laugh, one only, and due only to Réjane ’s incomparable acting. During the third act the audience stamped and even hissed. As the fourth act progressed, the house slowly emptied, drop by drop.

It was a horrible, a sickening evening — but very instructive.

In the first intermission only two or three intimate friends came backstage.

I suspected that it was going badly, which is to say that I still clung to a small hope that it was not. The frozen smiles on the faces of my friends brought me certainty.

Nobody came back during the seeond intermission, and the cast were beginning to avoid me. The third act was being called when Feydeau came back from the front of the house.

I asked him what had happened.

‘Nothing. I have come to sec the third act with you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because. I’ll tell you later.’

Later he told me. There were two reasons. First, he had had his fill of hearing me talked about as people were already talking out front. I had had two successes, the Zoaques and Nono; I was easy game.

Mind you, I am not defending my play. I have reread it, and it is certainly bad. Above all, it is bungling. But do not forget that when a play goes badly there are always, in any openingnight audience that respects itself, does it always respect itself? — a score of playwrights who can never get a play accepted (accompanied by their loyal wives), a score of critics most of whom dissemble their opinion only when it is favorable to the play, a score of friends helpless to save you, whose efforts in this sense always make things look worse than they are, and finally a hundred individuals come from God knows where, who ought to be somewhere else, whom you meet everywhere, and who are always present to ‘sit up with the body.’

Feydeau had come back to be with me because he had sensed that my play was going to be hissed the first chance they got. He did not want to hear that any more than I did; and he did not want me to be alone when it happened.

The scene of the third act of La Clef is laid on board a yacht. There are three people on stage — husband, wife, and a young man. At the very moment when the husband discovers that his wife is deceiving him with the young man, he is seized by seasickness. The scene, I admit, is bizarre, because, whether it flops or not, it is not frankly comic. I thought this the best scene in the play; and yet it was precisely at the opening of this scene that the audience began to stamp in unison.

Stamping in unison, a characteristic of the French theatre, is a curious phenomenon. It is the spontaneous manifestation of an irritability which can no longer be kept within bounds. I speak now of true stamping in unison, the sincere collective thing, and not of isolated, deliberate — and vain — stamping. True stamping in unison is usually preceded by a laugh, a strange laugh, but a laugh which only the author can be taken in by. He says to himself, ‘Well, there’s a laugh I had n’t intended.’ Unfortunately this laugh is rapidly transformed into a sort of murmur out of which arises another, a more nervous, a snickering laugh, which, when it comes, leaves no room for doubt in the mind of the poor author. There are times when the murmur suddenly stops and is succeeded by a deep, terrifying silence. An unexpected, astonishing, extremely clear, or completely incomprehensible line may bring about this brief truce. And when, a moment later, the murmur starts up again, it rises to a rumble. And then somebody, the first man, hisses! What follows is horrible.

If you have never heard yourself hissed you can have no notion how physically painful it is. I can imagine that if one has committed an evil act, has been disloyal, has committed treason or a felony, one should bow one’s head to the storm, beat one’s breast, and say, ‘I deserve this.’ But to have written a bad third act is not really so reprehensible. I cannot agree that I deserved that chastisement — or at least that is what I said to myself when I heard the horrible sound that rang in my ears and shriveled my heart.

An audience should not hiss. It has the right to do it, and its right should be preserved; but it should never use this right. It is too much. It is barbarous. I can understand that if an actor conducts himself insultingly before an audience an immediate apology should be demanded; but to hiss an author when his play has done no one injury! It is too much. I repeat, it is barbarous. God knows, it is already terrible enough to have a flop!

I must have looked pretty sick backstage while the hissing went on, for Feydeau said to me gently, ‘Don’t listen. Come along.’ He took me by the arm, as if I had been an invalid, and dragged me off the stage and into Réjane’s dressing room.

‘ What is that?’ he asked as we went in.

‘That’ was an espalier about six feet square, with peaches entwined in the latticework. On the floor stood a strawberry bush. I had sent them to Réjane myself, by way of thanks. Poor Réjane, who was now being hissed because of me! It was ten minutes before we observed that absent-mindedly, while we were talking, Feydeau and I had eaten all the strawberries.

At midnight the curtain fell, and with it the play. A score of friends came back with hands outstretched, all affectionate, kind, and sorrowful. Each had his formula: —

‘Cut the third act.’

‘I should open the play with act two.’

‘Put the second in place of the third, change ten lines, and you’ve got a play.’

‘The fourth is the dangerous one.’

‘Set act three in a drawing-room and the play is saved.’

They all spoke at once. It was unbearable. Then one voice rose above the rest and addressed them all: ‘Don’t you think the poor chap has had enough as it is? For God’s sake, leave him alone!’ The voice was Jean Ajalbert’s, and my friendship for him dates from that night.

A half hour later I went into Pousset’s to ‘take something’ — as if I had not already taken enough that evening! I did not dare look at anybody as I made my way into the restaurant. I knew it was filled with theatre people, and I was as ashamed as if I had done something evil, although I had simply done something badly. Most of all, I was sad. Coming on foot from Réjane’s to the Pousset my future had seemed to me problematic, to say the least. Someone called to me. I turned my head. It was Antoine, taking supper with five or six other people. I went over to him, trembling.

‘Do me three acts for the Odéon. I’ll take the play blind.’

I could have kissed him. I hereby do.

I had been applauded, I had been hissed. Now I considered myself a true playwright.

V

It was during the run of Le Kurtz, a piece of nonsense which I wrote in one hour and which was performed at the Capucines in 1905, that there happened an extraordinary thing which I must tell you about.

Jeanne Granier, the star, was being paid eight hundred francs a night. Toward the fiftieth performance, the gross began to decline, and what was a normal honorarium in a normal house soon became a heavy burden in a small house whose maximum was two thousand francs. Mortier, the manager, thereupon proposed to Granier that she take 50 per cent of the gross. ‘If we do sixteen hundred francs,’he pointed out, ‘you will get your eight hundred. If we do only twelve, you get only six; but if we do two thousand — on a Saturday night, say — you ’ll get a thousand.’ Being a woman of sense, she agreed.

But what did she do? Having learned that King Edward VII, who had made an official visit of four days to Paris, was planning to spend another week incognito, she had a common friend ask him to attend the performance. He had known her and liked her playing in London some years before. Out of feelings of friendliness and admiration, he promised to come, and he came.

The King of England at the Capucines! It was enough to drive up the gross instantly. The house was filled to capacity night after night, and our admirable Jeanne Granier was paid one thousand francs for each performance instead of eight hundred.

But what I want to tell you is the story of that famous night.

When he learned that the King of England was planning to attend his little theatre, Michel Mortier nearly went out of his mind. He had the partition removed between the two centre boxes and the Union Jack and Tricolor draped before them to draw the attention of such spectators as might not have otherwise remarked the incredible presence of the King. The British Ambassador had sent word to Mortier that His Majesty desired his arrival and departure to take place as discreetly as possible. It goes without saying that Mortier paid no attention to this message. Before nine o’clock a small band was concealed in the courtyard of the Capucines, ready to attack ‘God Save the King5 when signaled to. Mortier, in a state of great agitation, paced back and forth before his tiny theatre. I was there, too.

Suddenly — we could not believe our eyes! — the tall figure of Leopold, King of the Belgians, rose before us. What had happened? There must be some mistake. This beautiful white beard doubtless belonged to somebody who resembled the Belgian King. No, there was no mistake. The beautiful white beard was actually that of the monarch who Emile Verhaeren said was ‘a king too big for his little country.’

Mortier, completely out of his mind, went across to the astonished King and spoke these crazy words: —

‘But . . . it’s not you!’

The King of the Belgians, thinking doubtless that Mortier was a lunatic, walked straight past him into the theatre, accompanied by a blond young man. Two orchestra seats had been reserved for him in the first row, and he went directly down to them.

Mortier was still in a state of bewilderment when a landau, drawn by two horses, was driven into the courtyard. King Edward VII stepped out to the sound of a ‘ God Save the King’ so thin that it was drowned out by the horses’ hoofs. He strode into the theatre so rapidly that Mortier had no time to address to him the words of welcome he had certainly prepared. Indeed, his presence might have gone unnoticed had not Mortier thought it his duty to shout, ‘ Vive le roi!‘

At this cry everybody turned his head except King Leopold and his secretary, who whispered to each other and seemed undecided what attitude they should adopt in the face of this unexpected acclaim. But when he heard ‘God Save the King,’ this time forte, played in the very vestibule of the boxes, King Leopold was completely mystified. Why would they play the British anthem for him? He turned his head and saw the whole house standing, and nobody looking in his direction. Thereupon he turned completely round and got up. As he was very tall it was easy enough for him to see the King of England, who at that moment saw him. There came over King Edward’s face a look of delighted surprise. He raised his hand, and, following it, everybody turned and saw the King of the Belgians. There, in the smallest theatre in Paris, sat two Majesties!

Mortier continued to run back and forth shouting at the top of his voice, ‘I have two kings! I have two kings!’

VI

I have already told how and why my father and I fell out in 1905. Following the opening of Nono, Jules Renard tried in vain to bring about a reconciliation. The years passed, and each year seemed to dig a little deeper the gulf between us. One evening, at the end of thirteen years, when I was playing in Deburau at the Vaudeville in 1918, the house manager came back to tell me that my father had taken a loge for that evening. I could not believe my ears; and although he insisted that he had himself seen and spoken to my father, that he had offered him the loge but my father had preferred to pay for it, I still thought there must be a mistake. My father come to see me act! Impossible.

It was true, though. He was there in his seat well before the curtain rose.

I have always been subject to stage fright on opening nights, terrible stage fright; but no mere opening has ever affected me as did this. I saw him as soon as I walked on. My heart began to jump, and it was only by a real effort that I was able to utter a sound. I kept saying to myself, ‘He has n’t come to find out whether I can act or not. What has he come for? ’ The air of authority on stage that I generally evince, an air inherited from my father, vanished altogether. I felt suddenly very young, a mere child. It was not that I saw again my father and me as we were when we quarreled thirteen years before in his dressing room; I saw us really as father and child, myself in Russia at the age of five, in his arms.

When the play was over, Tristan Bernard brought me a letter I read with beating heart, in which my father asked me to come to lunch the next day. You can imagine what our meeting was and how little I was astonished to hear him say, ‘ While you were on last night, do you know how I saw you? As a child of five, in Russia, in my arms.’

We rose from the table and he took me to one side. ‘Write me a play,’ he said, ‘quickly!’

I told him it was already begun, which was almost the truth. The idea of writing a play about Pasteur had haunted me for two years. What had stopped me was the difficulty of finding an actor able to incarnate such a character. Now the thing had become possible.

I wrote Pasteur in five days, an act a day. On the sixth day I went down to the Touraine, where my father was spending his holiday, and read it to him. Three months later we were in rehearsal at the Vaudeville.

I had meanwhile sent word to Monsieur Vallery-Radot, the son-in-law of the immortal scientist, that I had written a play round the life of his illustrious father-in-law and wished very much to read it to him and his wife. The coolness with which they received me made it plain that they disapproved in advance of the very idea of a play about Louis Pasteur. I had sat down and was about to begin my reading when Monsieur Vallery-Radot said: —

‘Sir, I should like you to know that my wife and I will do everything in our power to prevent the performance of your play. It is a matter of principle with us, and we think it only fair that you know this before you read us your play.’

By the time I had finished reading the first act they said no more about preventing the performance of the play and were even good enough to express their thanks. When the whole play had been read to them Monsieur Vallery-Radot made only one request, which was that I delete a single speech because it was something Pasteur could not have said. I pointed out that the line was italicized in my script for the reason that it was quoted from an address Pasteur had delivered before the Academy of Science; but I struck it out nevertheless.

Madame Vallery-Radot did me the honor of attending one of the last performances of the play. I sat beside her. When my father entered, made up as Pasteur, she was so startled that she murmured, ‘Papa!’ I leaned over and whispered in her ear, ’No — Papa.’

On the opening night I observed a modestly dressed man of pleasant appearance standing in the shadow of the wings. As each act began he would go closer to the set, listen eagerly, and peer between the walls of the scenery with such interest that I quite forgot to remind him that ‘only members of the cast are allowed backstage during the performance.’ But during the third act, when for the first time Pasteur is about to inoculate a small boy against the rabies, I saw my man open a door in the set part way in order the better to see what was going on. I asked him not to do that. He said: —

‘Excuse me, sir. I am the concierge at the Pasteur Institute, and I particularly want to see this scene.’

I asked why.

‘Because that’s me.’

‘You? Which one?’

‘The little boy. That’s me. I was the first one whose life was saved by Monsieur Pasteur.’

This play, in which I had staged a character as little theatrical as can be, a man of science; this play, in which there was not a single part for a woman, was thought by many people to be doomed to fail. If anyone had asked my father whether or not he believed Pasteur was going to be a hit, he would undoubtedly have answered that the success of the play was the least of his worries. He was thinking of the success of the evening, not the success of the play. I have seen him at work on a score of parts, seen him examine them from every angle, labor over them in the day only to dream about them in the night; yet I may say that never has an actor, not even he himself, brought to the interpretation of a character so much conscience, so much love, so much genius.

On the opening night, when the cast had twenty curtain calls and someone finally cried, ‘Author!’ my father stepped down to the footlights and said, verbatim, the following: —

‘ Ladies and gentlemen: I beg you to forgive and to understand the emotion which fills me as it becomes my duty to announce to you the name of the author of the play which we have had the honor of performing this evening. It would be impossible for me to precede his name with the word monsieur. I shall therefore not tell you who the author of this play is. But I shall owe you the greatest joy of my life if you will be good enough to allow me to show him to you.’

And now that I have told you the happiest memory of my life, suppose we leave it at that, and write FINIS.