Never had I experienced anything more thrilling. I used to lie on the floor during the rehearsals, and soon I knew the whole act by heart. I thought Betty the greatest genius that ever lived.
When Chérie came back she was rather surprised and not altogether pleased to find I knew the whole of the last act of _Hernani_ by heart. She thought this a little too exciting and grown-up for me, and even for Margaret, but none the less she let me perform the part of Doña Sol one evening after tea in my mother’s bedroom, dressed in a white frock, with Susan in a riding-habit playing the sinister figure of Ruy Gomez. I can see Chérie now, sitting behind a screen, book in hand to prompt me, and shaking with laughter as I piped out in a tremulous and lisping treble the passionate words:
“Il vaudrait mieuxzaller (which I made all one word) au tigre même Arracher ses petits qu’à moi celui que j’aime.”
Chérie’s return from her holidays was one of the most exciting of events, for she would bring back with her a mass of toys from Giroux and the _Paradis des Enfants_, and a flood of stories about the people and places and plays she had seen, and the food she had eaten.
One year she brought me back a theatre of puppets. It was called Théâtre français. It had a white proscenium, three scenes and an interior, a Moorish garden by moonlight, and a forest, and a quantity of small puppets suspended by stiff wires and dressed in silk and satin. There was a harlequin, a columbine, a king, a queen, many princesses, a villain scowling beneath black eyebrows, an executioner with a mask, peasants, pastry-cooks, and soldiers with halberds, who would have done honour to the Papal Guard at the Vatican, and some heavily moustached gendarmes. This theatre was a source of ecstasy, and innumerable dramas used to be performed in it. Chérie used also to bring back some delicious cakes called _nonnettes_, a kind of gingerbread with icing on the top, rolled up in a long paper cylinder.
She also brought baskets of bonbons from Boissier, the kind of basket which had several floors of different kinds of bonbons, fondants on the top in their white frills, then caramels, then chocolates, then fruits confits. All these things confirmed one’s idea that there could be no place like Paris.