was offering me, at every step, joys so easily attained
and so sweet to relish.
"Is Monsieur perhaps waiting for someone?" the waiter asked me.
Some one? Why no, I was not waiting for anyone. The door of the restaurant opened and I quickly turned around. Then I understood why the waiter had asked that question. Each time the door opened I would hastily turn around as I did just now and would stare anxiously at the people entering as if I knew that someone was about to enter, someone I was waiting for. . . . Some one! Well, for whom could I be waiting?
I very seldom went to the theatre; to force me there, a special occasion or obligation or inducement was required. I quite believe that of my own accord I would never think of going there. I even affected a supreme contempt for the kind of literary stuff offered for sale in these pushcart markets of mediocrity. Conceiving, as I did, the theatre as a place not of idle distraction but of serious art, it was repugnant to me to see human passion warbling one and the same sentimental tune amidst the mechanism of always identical scenes, to see gaiety, bedecked with tinsel, tumbling into the same pit of tomfoolery. A manufacturer of such plays, be they ever so applauded, seemed to me an artist gone astray; he bore the same relation to the poet that an unfrocked clergyman bears to a priest, or a deserter does to a soldier!
And I always remembered Lirat's remark, so powerfully concise, so profoundly discerning. We had been attending the funeral of the painter M. The celebrated dramatist D was the chief mourner. At the cemetery he delivered an address. This did not surprise anyone, for did not H and D enjoy a reputation of equal greatness? At
