“And you?” asked Ninon.
“I am the fool Arlequin, or Scaramouche, the bragging captain.”
“Full of wind and fire, but no warmth?” asked Ninon, her eyes wide with feigned innocence.
“Touché. You must remember that line. I had thought to make you one of the lovers, as Colombe represents, but with that tongue you might do better as the soubrette, the comic maid. Toinette has always been indifferent in that role—with her limited wit more suited to the inamorata parts, but Colombe’s vanity would never allow herself to be laughed at. When there was a maid to be played, it had to be Toinette.”
“But what of Hortense?”
“Hortense, alas, is too plain to play aught save old gossips and confidantes. Yes. ’Tis a fine arrangement. Toinette will be pleased. She can play the lover roles that suit her, and you will be our soubrette.” He stopped in the road, coolly appraising Ninon from top to toe. “You have a good enough shape. How are your legs?”
“Well suited to carry me, monsieur!” she snapped.
“Morbleu! Will you play the virtuous maiden still? After all that I overheard at Marival? I asked merely because the soubrette often disguises herself as a man. It is to your advantage if your legs are shapely in trunk hose. Now, as to your speeches. It is not such a difficult matter as you might suppose. Not all of your speeches must be extempore. They must only appear to be so. The soggetto will indicate entrances and exits, day, night, time, and place; where a bit of comic business is needed—such as falls, disguises, drunken stumbling, asides, mimicry. The Italians call these comic bits lazzi. And every player has a book of ‘conceits,’ set pieces writ down for any occasion—entrances, dialogues, reproaches, greetings, contemplation of a lover’s virtue, grief at a lover’s betrayal. He commits them to memory, and uses them at the proper moment in a play, adding more to his book as he invents them. ‘Lament for a Lost Lover’ might make an interesting conceit. Think you so?” His face betrayed no emotion, but his dark eyes studied Ninon carefully.
She smiled tightly. “But then, Marc-Antoine, as the pedant, must have a book filled with fatuous maxims, such as ‘A crude oaf is not a gentleman.’ Or even, ‘A blind man sees nothing’!”
“And mayhap, ‘A woman who pines for a lost love is a fool’!”
“‘A simpleton speaks with the tongue of a simpleton’!” said Ninon, her eyes flashing. “Shall we fill a complete book with insults, or shall we proceed with my initiation into the mysteries of the farce?”
He smiled and bowed mockingly. “Your grief has not blunted your tongue. Eh bien. We have had some success with a play called The Imaginary Cuckold, or Le Vicomte Jaloux. I shall give you the soggetto to study, of course, and you may use Toinette’s book of conceits, but the basis of the plot is the wife—you—who contemplates betraying her braggart of a husband—myself—because of his jealousy.”
Ninon laughed. “Scarcely a part written to the life! A man who has no love for women has no jealousy either!”
His eyebrow twitched sardonically. “It is a triumph of my art. And then, of course, I get to beat you.”
Ninon stopped in her tracks. “The devil you do! Gaston,” she called to Floresse, who had walked on ahead, “in The Jealous Vicomte, am I to be beaten by this brute?”
At these words there was a chorus of laughter from the company. Chanteclair, who had been urging on the ox, halted the animal and turned grinning to Ninon. Only Toinette looked distressed.
“Is she to have my part, Val?”
He smiled reassuringly. “But only because I wish you to represent the lover Isabelle. That way, you may kiss Joseph on the stage as well as off. Does that please you?”
Toinette nodded her head, her pale blond curls bobbing vigorously. “I never liked the role of Fiamette.”
Ninon stamped her foot. “Answer me, Gaston! Is he to beat me?”
Gaston nodded his head solemnly. “But you are to crash half a score of plates over his head.”
“I always hated that part,” said Toinette. “I could not do it aright.”
“I shall have no such fears,” muttered Ninon. “Beat me, indeed!”
“Nom de Dieu,” growled Valentin. “Lest you think we are savages, let me assure you that we beat one another with slapsticks, and nothing more. Look!” He rummaged in the wagon and pulled out a broad bat that consisted of two wide strips of lath loosely bound into a handle at one end. Whirling, he clapped Chanteclair on the top of the head with the weapon. There was a loud crack as the top lath strip smacked down upon the lower. Chanteclair began to whistle. “As you see,” said Valentin, “there is much sound, but no damage. Upon occasion, we will put a squib of powder between the two strips. The noise and the flash seem to enchant children—and provincial nobility, who have little to do except watch plays and commit adultery!”
Ninon ignored the gibe. “And the plates?” she asked.
Gaston made a face. “It is my chore to glue them back together again after each representation of The Imaginary Cuckold. They will break with the slightest tap upon Valentin’s skull. And no harm done.”
“What a pity,” said Ninon.
They stayed that night in a little inn outside Epinac, taking three large rooms and a small one just off the kitchen, which was all that the innkeeper had to offer. They supped in the women’s chamber, seated about a large trestle table that their host had put up; then spent the remainder of the evening at trictrac and storytelling, the women lolling on the two beds, the men at the table with the board and dice. Valentin gave Ninon the soggetti for The Jealous Vicomte and half a dozen other farces, as well as the written parts to several tragedies and pastorals that she was to commit to memory. Colombe, while making clear that no one could ever play tragedy as well as she, graciously offered to assist Ninon in the learning of her parts.
They retired at half-past twelve. Ninon shared one of the beds with Hortense; Colombe, used to having a bed to herself, grudgingly made room for Toinette. The largest room, with a bed and a small cot, was shared by Joseph, Sébastien, and Chanteclair. Despite the innkeeper’s insistence that Monsieur Sanscoeur, as head of the company, should sleep alone in the small room, Valentin was adamant about not being alone, almost coming to blows with the man over the matter. In the end, it was decided that Gaston should sleep in the room next to the kitchen and Valentin and Marc-Antoine would share a bed in the fourth chamber. Ninon found Valentin’s anger inexplicable, but she was too tired to care. She slept quite soundly, though she thought at some time during the night Hortense had left the bed.
In the morning, the innkeeper announced that there would be horses for rent to take them as far as Autun, if they would but wait another day. It seemed a sensible idea. There was a broad meadow and a stream hard by the inn, where the company could rehearse, and do their laundry, and take their leisure. While the women, stripped down to their chemises—the garment knotted high on one hip—knelt in the shallow water with armloads of petticoats and neck linen to be washed, the men, clad only in breeches, practiced their fencing with blunt swords, and perfected a tumble or a pratfall or other lazzi. Ninon was surprised at the ease with which they revealed their bodies to one another. Indeed, when Joseph decided to go for a swim, he stripped off his breeches and jumped naked into the stream; and Hortense, angry at something Sébastien had said, turned her back to him, lifted up her chemise, and waggled her bare backside. Ninon was scarcely prudish, but she was glad that she was busy with Gaston and Valentin, learning the techniques of acting. It would take getting used to, this dressing and undressing before her fellows. It didn’t help that Valentin, sitting next to her on the grass with several books of plays, seemed aware of her discomfort and viewed it with amusement.
“Did I not tell you it was a hard life?” he smirked.
She flashed him an angry look and snatched a book from his hands. “The life is not difficult. Only some of the people! Now tell me of this play.”
“As you can see,” he said, “it came to us from the
Théâtre du Marais in Paris. Scévole. Du Ryer wrote it some years ago, but had it published only last year. We cannot copy a play, however great its success, until it is published.”
“Which is not to say,” interrupted Gaston, “that we have not, upon occasion…hem…borrowed an idea or two!”
“It is in five acts, with Alexandrine verse. Remember that. If you forget a line (I trust you will not) and you must improvise, try to keep the rhythm, if not the rhyme, of the Alexandrine.”
“You should not be concerned,” reassured Gaston, seeing the look on Ninon’s face. “Now that she can no longer appear upon the stage, Colombe will be the book-holder. Unless a sudden wind blows out her candle, she will quietly supply the verse you lack.” Remembering Colombe’s vanity and jealousy, Ninon wondered whether she ought to find Gaston’s words comforting.
“How quickly can you learn the plays I gave you last evening?” asked Valentin.
“I shall do the best I can.”
“You know,” said Gaston, “you need not memorize the parts to the very word. Particularly those in prose.” He held up a warning finger. “Except, of course, Val’s plays. He has been known to rage at a misplaced ‘if.’ Is it not so, mon ami?”
Valentin grunted.
“I did not know you were a poet as well as an actor,” said Ninon, with genuine warmth. “How splendid! Were any of them yours, the plays that you gave me last night to read?”
“Spare me your patronizing. Yes. Two of them were. The Amours of Phocidon and The Spiteful Wife.”
“I might have guessed,” she said sourly, stung by his rudeness toward what, surely, he knew was meant to be a compliment. “Your verses deal with the wickedness of the female sex, the evils of love. They suit you.”
He laughed. “They suited Monsieur le Comte de Froissart as well. He was positively inflamed! Do you recall the verse? I made it up especial, on the spot.”
“Curse you,” she whispered, feeling her face flame red.
“Ah! Then you did hear the lines. I thought perhaps not. You seemed…otherwise engaged at the time. Tell me, who was the lout showing the world he owned you with his slavering kisses?”
Ninon turned to Gaston. “Are all women whores in his eyes?”
Floresse shrugged. “Pay him no mind. It is his nature.”
Valentin leaned back on the grass, his eyes scanning Ninon insolently. “What did you do at Marival?” His mouth twitched in a mocking smile. “That is, what was your employ?”
“I was tutor to the children!” she snapped.
“Alas! Does that mean I cannot mock you in Latin, lest you divine my meaning?”
“Nor Greek! If they bothered to teach you the language in your misbegotten youth!”
“Come, come,” said Gaston. “Let us have peace! There is so much to be learned. And little time for it.”
Valentin glared angrily at Ninon from beneath his brows. “There is no point in bothering until she learns her parts.”
Ninon returned his look, her chin set in a hard line. “No point at all!” She stood up and kicked off her shoes, then quickly removed her stockings and stripped off her clothes until she stood in her chemise before him. Defiantly she pulled it up above her thighs, seeing the flicker in his eyes at the sight of her bare legs. “No point at all!” She knotted the garment at her hips, turned on her heel, and splashed furiously into the stream.
They made music that night after supper, sitting comfortably on the beds and elbow chairs in the women’s room. It was common to have interludes of music and dancing between the acts of a play, and many a dismal tragic performance had been saved by a sprightly roundelay or a well-turned step. Since Marc-Antoine could play both the guitar and the bass viol, he chose the larger instrument so that Ninon might use his guitar. Sébastien took up his theorbo, a kind of bass lute, and sang to his own accompaniment a mournful ballad. His voice was sweet and clear; Ninon thought it was quite the most beautiful voice she had heard, until Marc-Antoine began to sing in a high tenor and put the decision in doubt. And when they joined together for a duet, the room was filled with a sound the angels might envy.
They both were good teachers: in a while Ninon was able to join them in trios of sad and merry songs. Valentin, despite his scowls, grudgingly conceded Ninon’s skills with the guitar, if not the fineness of her voice. Chanteclair put in a brief appearance as “Grandmère,” sending them all to their beds in an aura of goodwill and camaraderie. Ninon sat up late, studying and memorizing her lines by candlelight until Colombe, petulant, implored her to blow out the candle that they all might sleep. Ninon was not certain, but it seemed as though Hortense was missing a good part of the night.
In the morning, well breakfasted and riding double on the horses they had rented, they set out for Autun. The days were pleasant, but busy ones for Ninon. The weather was hot and they stopped often at inns, or in cool woods, to refresh themselves, while Valentin gave Ninon instruction in his art. And while they traveled, there was always one of Ninon’s comrades to hear her recite her lines. She soon had committed half a dozen plays to memory, as well as Toinette’s book of conceits—scores of rhymes and poetic passages she could insert into the improvised comedies. Valentin was a strict taskmaster, rehearsing her over and over again in the playing of her parts. “You must speak loudly enough to be heard in the highest reaches of the paradis, the topmost gallery!” he would insist, stepping farther away from her into the woods. “Louder!” he would shout after her every recital of a line, and, “Again! Again! Again!” until she felt as though her voice were being torn from her throat. And when she had no voice left, he concentrated on her facial expressions and gestures. “If they cannot hear you,” he said, “as is often the case in the old converted tennis courts, they must understand you by your grimaces and gestures. Enlarge every movement. Clutch at your breast if you are in love, spurn with your hands a faithless friend, stamp your foot in anger. Your ‘tirades,’ those long, impassioned speeches in the tragedies, must be carefully rehearsed with suitable gestures, and your comic maids must know how to toss a disdainful head, shrug up a shoulder in coquetry—though I scarce think any woman needs to be taught such tricks. It is in their natures.”
“If you please,” Ninon said through clenched teeth, “must you take the occasion of my instruction for one of your insults against the members of my sex? Let us agree, once for all, that you do not like me, nor I you, and get on with the business!”
The sharpness of her rebuke seemed to abate his venom somewhat, and he contrived to be a little less unpleasant for a time. And Ninon found herself less and less bothered as the days went on—in part because Valentin (though a good comrade to the men) was disagreeable in equal measure to all the women of the troupe. And because, as Gaston had said, it seemed to be his nature, and hardly worth her ire.
After a week or so, Valentin decided that Ninon was ready to rehearse with the full company. Now when they stopped in the heat of midday to rest the horses and seek the coolness of a shadowy grove, they took the occasion to play out whole scenes, indicating to Ninon where to move, on what line to stand, how many steps to take before she turned. And more than one traveler, seeing on a distant hill a man tearing at his hair, a woman pacing to and fro with a wringing of her hands, was sure that the country folk had gone mad.
At night, snug in some cozy inn, the whole company cheerfully criticized Ninon’s delivery and movements, and lamented the failings of her wardrobe. Since most of the plays were costumed in current fashions, she was expected to supply her own, using her own gowns as necessary.
“Upon my word, Valentin,” Hortense said good-naturedly, indicating Ninon’s blue gown, “if Madame Ninon is to play the queen in Herod, she cannot do it looking like a meat merchant’s wife! An audience expects to be dazzled.”
“When was the last time you dazzled an audience, Madame Joubert?” Sébastien said to Hortense, his voice hard and mocking.
“The last time you were able to make an audience believe in
your prowess as a lover, Monsieur Duvet,” she responded coldly.
“But ’tis the best gown I own,” said Ninon.
“And scarcely fit if you are to represent nobility,” sneered Colombe.
“Wait,” said Chanteclair, rummaging in a large trunk. “Have we not a bit of tinsel and copper lace to festoon the bodice? If you are skilled with a needle, ma petite.” He proffered the glittering fabric to Ninon, and indicated his own plain suit of clothes: narrow breeches fastened at the knee, a simple, waist-length doublet, square-toed shoes, and unadorned linen at neck and wrists. “I myself have turned this humble garb into an emperor’s raiment when necessity, and an empty purse, demanded it.”
Valentin nodded in agreement. “True enough. It can be done. And we have enough glass ‘diamonds’ and ‘rubies’ to trick her out as royalty. Of course, if you are to play a character role, Ninon—a Turkish princess, a Roman slave—you may borrow a costume from the many we keep at hand for such parts. And could she not use your velvet gown, Colombe? You have quite outgrown it.”
Colombe flounced on the bed, her eyes narrowing in jealous anger. “No! She should tear it at the seams. She is neither small enough nor dainty enough!”
“Nor are you, my sweet, nor are you!” simpered Marc-Antoine, holding a pillow against his belly and prancing about the room. He dropped the pillow and ducked as one of Colombe’s shoes came flying past his head. He bowed low, then picked up the shoe and passed it under his nose, pretending to be overwhelmed by the odor. “Madame! A scented rosebud for my performance. You are too kind!”
Dreams So Fleeting Page 10
