He returned the next day. But those two days of absence had broken the
charm of their delightful make-believe. They looked at each other, in
the dressing-room, with their sad eyes, without exchanging a word.
Raoul had to restrain himself not to cry out: "I am jealous! I am jealous! I am jealous!"
But she heard him all the same. Then she said: "Come for a walk, dear. The air will do you good."
Raoul thought that she would propose a stroll in the country, far from
that building which he detested as a prison whose jailer he could feel
walking within the walls ... the jailer Erik ... But she took him to
the stage and made him sit on the wooden curb of a well, in the
doubtful peace and coolness of a first scene set for the evening's
performance.
On another day, she wandered with him, hand in, hand, along the
deserted paths of a garden whose creepers had been cut out by a
decorator's skilful hands. It was as though the real sky, the real
flowers, the real earth were forbidden her for all time and she
condemned to breathe no other air than that of the theater. An
occasional fireman passed, watching over their melancholy idyll from
afar. And she would drag him up above the clouds, in the magnificent
disorder of the grid, where she loved to make him giddy by running in
front of him along the frail bridges, among the thousands of ropes
fastened to the pulleys, the windlasses, the rollers, in the midst of a
regular forest of yards and masts. If he hesitated, she said, with an
adorable pout of her lips: "You, a sailor!"
And then they returned to terra firma, that is to say, to some passage
that led them to the little girls' dancing-school, where brats between
six and ten were practising their steps, in the hope of becoming great
dancers one day, "covered with diamonds ..." Meanwhile, Christine gave
them sweets instead.
She took him to the wardrobe and property-rooms, took him all over her
empire, which was artificial, but immense, covering seventeen stories
from the ground-floor to the roof and inhabited by an army of subjects.
She moved among them like a popular queen, encouraging them in their
labors, sitting down in the workshops, giving words of advice to the
workmen whose hands hesitated to cut into the rich stuffs that were to
clothe heroes. There were inhabitants of that country who practised
every trade. There were cobblers, there were goldsmiths. All had
learned to know her and to love her, for she always interested herself
in all their troubles and all their little hobbies.
She knew unsuspected corners that were secretly occupied by little old
couples. She knocked at their door and introduced Raoul to them as a
Prince Charming who had asked for her hand; and the two of them,
sitting on some worm-eaten "property," would listen to the legends of
the Opera, even as, in their childhood, they had listened to the old
Breton tales. Those old people remembered nothing outside the Opera.
They had lived there for years without number. Past managements had
forgotten them; palace revolutions had taken no notice of them; the
history of France had run its course unknown to them; and nobody
recollected their existence.