Rafael Sabatini - The Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

The performance was in every sense unexciting; the audience meagre and unenthusiastic. The benches provided in the front half of the market contained some twenty-seven persons: eleven at twenty sous a head and sixteen at twelve. Behind these stood a rabble of some thirty others at six sous apiece. Thus the gross takings were two louis, ten livres, and two sous. By the time M. Binet had paid for the use of the market, his lights, and the expenses of his company at the inn over Sunday, there was not likely to be very much left towards the wages of his players. It is not surprising, therefore, that M. Binet’s bonhomie should have been a trifle overcast that evening.

“And what do you think of it?” he asked Andre–Louis, as they were walking back to the inn after the performance.

“Possibly it could have been worse; probably it could not,” said he.

In sheer amazement M. Binet checked in his stride, and turned to look at his companion.

“Huh!” said he. “Dieu de Dien! But you are frank.”

“An unpopular form of service among fools, I know.”

“Well, I am not a fool,” said Binet.

“That is why I am frank. I pay you the compliment of assuming intelligence in you, M. Binet.”

“Oh, you do?” quoth M. Binet. “And who the devil are you to assume anything? Your assumptions are presumptuous, sir.” And with that he lapsed into silence and the gloomy business of mentally casting up his accounts.

But at table over supper a half-hour later he revived the topic.

“Our latest recruit, this excellent M. Parvissimus,” he announced, “has the impudence to tell me that possibly our comedy could have been worse, but that probably it could not.” And he blew out his great round cheeks to invite a laugh at the expense of that foolish critic.

“That’s bad,” said the swarthy and sardonic Polichinelle. He was grave as Rhadamanthus pronouncing judgment. “That’s bad. But what is infinitely worse is that the audience had the impudence to be of the same mind.”

“An ignorant pack of clods,” sneered Leandre, with a toss of his handsome head.

“You are wrong,” quoth Harlequin. “You were born for love, my dear, not criticism.”

Leandre — a dull dog, as you will have conceived — looked contemptuously down upon the little man. “And you, what were you born for?” he wondered.

“Nobody knows,” was the candid admission. “Nor yet why. It is the case of many of us, my dear, believe me.”

“But why”— M. Binet took him up, and thus spoilt the beginnings of a very pretty quarrel —“why do you say that Leandre is wrong?”

“To be general, because he is always wrong. To be particular, because I judge the audience of Guichen to be too sophisticated for ‘The Heartless Father.’”

“You would put it more happily,” interposed Andre–Louis — who was the cause of this discussion —“if you said that ‘The Heartless Father’ is too unsophisticated for the audience of Guichen.”

“Why, what’s the difference?” asked Leandre.

“I didn’t imply a difference. I merely suggested that it is a happier way to express the fact.”

“The gentleman is being subtle,” sneered Binet.

“Why happier?” Harlequin demanded.

“Because it is easier to bring ‘The Heartless Father’ to the sophistication of the Guichen audience, than the Guichen audience to the unsophistication of ‘The Heartless Father.’”

“Let me think it out,” groaned Polichinelle, and he took his head in his hands.

But from the tail of the table Andre–Louis was challenged by Climene who sat there between Columbine and Madame.

“You would alter the comedy, would you, M. Parvissimus?” she cried.

He turned to parry her malice.

“I would suggest that it be altered,” he corrected, inclining his head.

“And how would you alter it, monsieur?”

“I? Oh, for the better.”

“But of course!” She was sleekest sarcasm. “And how would you do it?”

“Aye, tell us that,” roared M. Binet, and added: “Silence, I pray you, gentlemen and ladies. Silence for M. Parvissimus.”

Andre–Louis looked from father to daughter, and smiled. “Pardi!” said he. “I am between bludgeon and dagger. If I escape with my life, I shall be fortunate. Why, then, since you pin me to the very wall, I’ll tell you what I should do. I should go back to the original and help myself more freely from it.”

“The original?” questioned M. Binet — the author.

“It is called, I believe, ‘Monsieur de Pourceaugnac,’ and was written by Moliere.”

Somebody tittered, but that somebody was not M. Binet. He had been touched on the raw, and the look in his little eyes betrayed the fact that his bonhomme exterior covered anything but a bonhomme.

“You charge me with plagiarism,” he said at last; “with filching the ideas of Moliere.”

“There is always, of course,” said Andre–Louis, unruffled, “the alternative possibility of two great minds working upon parallel lines.”

M. Binet studied the young man attentively a moment. He found him bland and inscrutable, and decided to pin him down.

“Then you do not imply that I have been stealing from Moliere?”

“I advise you to do so, monsieur,” was the disconcerting reply.

M. Binet was shocked.

“You advise me to do so! You advise me, me, Antoine Binet, to turn thief at my age!”

“He is outrageous,” said mademoiselle, indignantly.

“Outrageous is the word. I thank you for it, my dear. I take you on trust, sir. You sit at my table, you have the honour to be included in my company, and to my face you have the audacity to advise me to become a thief — the worst kind of thief that is conceivable, a thief of spiritual things, a thief of ideas! It is insufferable, intolerable! I have been, I fear, deeply mistaken in you, monsieur; just as you appear to have been mistaken in me. I am not the scoundrel you suppose me, sir, and I will not number in my company a man who dares to suggest that I should become one. Outrageous!”

He was very angry. His voice boomed through the little room, and the company sat hushed and something scared, their eyes upon Andre–Louis, who was the only one entirely unmoved by this outburst of virtuous indignation.

“You realize, monsieur,” he said, very quietly, “that you are insulting the memory of the illustrious dead?”

“Eh?” said Binet.

Andre–Louis developed his sophistries.

“You insult the memory of Moliere, the greatest ornament of our stage, one of the greatest ornaments of our nation, when you suggest that there is vileness in doing that which he never hesitated to do, which no great author yet has hesitated to do. You cannot suppose that Moliere ever troubled himself to be original in the matter of ideas. You cannot suppose that the stories he tells in his plays have never been told before. They were culled, as you very well know — though you seem momentarily to have forgotten it, and it is therefore necessary that I should remind you — they were culled, many of them, from the Italian authors, who themselves had culled them Heaven alone knows where. Moliere took those old stories and retold them in his own language. That is precisely what I am suggesting that you should do. Your company is a company of improvisers. You supply the dialogue as you proceed, which is rather more than Moliere ever attempted. You may, if you prefer it — though it would seem to me to be yielding to an excess of scruple — go straight to Boccaccio or Sacchetti. But even then you cannot be sure that you have reached the sources.”

Andre–Louis came off with flying colours after that. You see what a debater was lost in him; how nimble he was in the art of making white look black. The company was impressed, and no one more that M. Binet, who found himself supplied with a crushing argument against those who in future might tax him with the impudent plagiarisms which he undoubtedly perpetrated. He retired in the best order he could from the position he had taken up at the outset.