e of Delaunay would suddenly be furnished, to enable it to slip
down to fourth, would stimulate and fertilise my brain with a sense of
bradding and blossoming life.

But if the thought of actors weighed so upon me, if the sight of
Maubant, coming out one afternoon from the Theatre-Francais, had plunged
me in the throes and sufferings of hopeless love, how much more did the
name of a 'star,' blazing outside the doors of a theatre, how much more,
seen through the window of a brougham which passed me in the street, the
hair over her forehead abloom with roses, did the face of a woman who,
I would think, was perhaps an actress, leave with me a lasting
disturbance, a futile and painful effort to form a picture of her
private life.

I classified, in order of talent, the most distinguished: Sarah
Bernhardt, Berma, Bartet, Madeleine Brohan, Jeanne Samary; but I was
interested in them all. Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and
also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses
in my mind. He used to entertain them at his house. And if we went to
see him on certain days only, that was because on the other days ladies
might come whom his family could not very well have met. So we at least
thought; as for my uncle, his fatal readiness to pay pretty widows (who
had perhaps never been married) and countesses (whose high-sounding
titles were probably no more than _noms de guerre_) the compliment of
presenting them to my grandmother or even of presenting to them some
of our family jewels, had already embroiled him more than once with
my grandfather. Often, if the name of some actress were mentioned in
conversation, I would hear my father say, with a smile, to my mother:
"One of your uncle's friends," and I would think of the weary novitiate
through which, perhaps for years on end, a grown man, even a man of real
importance, might have to pass, waiting on the doorstep of some such
lady, while she refused to answer his letters and made her hall-porter
drive him away; and imagine that my uncle was able to dispense a little
jackanapes like myself from all these sufferings by introducing me in
his own home to the actress, unapproachable by all the world, but for
him an intimate friend.

And so--on the pretext that some lesson, the hour of which had been
altered, now came at such an awkward time that it had already more than
once prevented me, and would continue to prevent me, from seeing my
uncle--one day, no