6
A CHAPTER OF SELF-ADMIRATION
TABLE TALK and lovers’ talk equally elude the grasp; lovers’ talk is clouds, table talk is smoke.
Fameuil and Dahlia hummed airs; Tholomyès drank, Zéphine laughed, Fantine smiled. Listolier blew a wooden trumpet that he had bought at Saint Cloud. Favourite looked tenderly at Blacheville and said:
“Blacheville, I adore you.”
This brought forth a question from Blacheville:
“What would you do, Favourite, if I should leave you?”
“Me!” cried Favourite. “Oh! do not say that, even in sport! If you should leave me, I would run after you, I would scratch you, I would pull your hair, I would throw water on you, I would have you arrested.”
Blacheville smiled with the effeminate foppery of a man whose self-love is tickled. Favourite continued:
“Yes! I would call the police! I wouldn’t hold back! I would scream, for example: scoundrel!”
Blacheville, in ecstasy, leaned back in his chair, and closed both eyes with a satisfied air.
Dahlia, still eating, whispered to Favourite in the hubbub:
“Are you really so fond of your Blacheville, then?”
“I detest him,” whispered Favourite, taking up her fork. “He is stingy; I am in love with the little fellow over the way from where I live. He is a nice young man; do you know him? Anybody can see that he was born to be an actor! I love actors. As soon as he comes into the house, his mother cries out: ‘Oh, dear! my peace is all gone. There, he is going to hallo! You will split my head;’ just because he goes into the garret among the rats, into the dark corners, as high as he can go, and sings and declaims—something or other so loud that they can hear him below! He already makes twenty sous a day by copying documents for a lawyer. He is the son of an old chorister of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas! Oh, he is a nice young man! He is so fond of me that he said one day, when he saw me making dough for pancakes: ‘Mamselle, make your gloves into fritters and I will eat them.’ Nobody but artists can say things like these; I am on the high road to go crazy about this little fellow. It is all the same, I tell Blacheville that I adore him. How I lie! Oh, how I lie!”
Favourite paused, then continued:
“Dahlia, you see I am melancholy. It has done nothing but rain all summer ; the wind irritates me, it is always in a bad mood. Blacheville is very stingy; there are hardly any green peas in the market yet, people care for nothing but eating; I have the spleen, as the English say; butter is so dear! and then, just think of it—it is horrible! We are dining in a room with a bed in it. I am disgusted with life.”