While he was speaking, Félicie had taken from the mantelpiece the pack of cards with which her mother played every night, and was spreading them out on the table.
"Don't disturb me, I am busy with a game of patience."
"Listen to me, Félicie. I won't have you receiving that fool in your dressing-room."
"All the blacks are at the bottom of the pack."
"I say that fool. He is a diplomatist, and nowadays the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the refuge of incompetents." Raising his voice, he continued: "Félicie, for your own sake, as well as for mine, listen to me!"
"Well, don't shout, then. Mama is asleep."
"Just get it into your head that I don't intend that Ligny shall be your lover."
She raised her spiteful little face, and replied:
He moved a step closer to her, raising his chair, gazing at her with the eye of a madman, and laughing a cracked laugh.
"If he is your lover, he won't be so for long."
Now she was alarmed. She forced herself to smile.
She succeeded without much difficulty in making him believe that she had spoken thus merely to punish him, because he was getting unbearable. He became calmer. She then informed him that she was tired out, that she was dropping with sleep. At last he decided to go home. On the landing he turned, and said:
"Félicie, I advise you, if you wish to avoid a tragedy, not to see Ligny again."
"Knock on the window of the porter's lodge, so that he can let you out!"
In the dark auditorium large linen sheets protected the balcony and the boxes. The orchestra was covered with a huge dust-cloth, which, being turned back at the edges, left room for a few human figures, indistinctly seen in the gloom: actors, scene-shifters, costumiers, friends of the manager, mothers and lovers and actresses. Here and there shone a pair of eyes from the black recesses of the boxes.
They were rehearsing, for the fifty-sixth time, _La Nuit du 23 octobre 1812_, a celebrated drama, dating twenty years back, which had not as yet been performed in this theatre. The actors knew their parts, and the following day had been chosen for that last private rehearsal which on stages less austere than that of the Odéon is known as "the dressmakers' rehearsal."
Nanteuil had no part in the play. But she had had business at the theatre that day, and, as she had been informed that Marie-Claire was execrable in the part of General Malet's wife, she had come to have a peep at her, concealed in the depths of a box.