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Alas! we must face it! in this ruthless and mournful crystal, the actor had just unmistakably seen that age was creeping over him.

He observed that his hair, which yesterday had still been only sprinkled with grey, was now turning to silver. So that was the end of it! Farewell to curtain calls and floral tributes! Farewell to the roses of Thalia, to the laurels of Melpomene! There must be an end now, and for ever, with many a handshake and tear, to the Ellevious and the Laruettes, to the great style and the easy manners, to Dugazons and ingénues!

He must climb hurriedly down from the chariot of Thespis, and watch it pass on into the distance, carrying away his companions. And then—to see the tinsel and the streamers waving from it in the morning sun, even from the wheels, sports of the gladsome winds of Hope, and to watch them disappearing at the distant bend of the road, away into the dusk.

Abruptly aware of his fifty years (he was an excellent fellow), Chaudval sighed. A mist passed before his eyes; a kind of wintry fever seized him, and hallucination dilated the pupils of his eyes.

In the end, the haggard fixity of gaze wherewith he plumbed the depths of the providential mirror gave his pupils the faculty of magnifying objects and infusing them with solemnity—a state which physiologists have observed in persons affected by emotion of great intensity.

And so, beneath his eyes with their load of troubled and toneless ideas, the long mirror changed its aspect. Memories of childhood, of the beach and silvery tides, danced in his brain; and the mirror, doubtless on account of the stars, which lent a sense of depth to its surface, gave him at first the feeling of the calm waters of a land-locked bay. Then, expanding further, thanks to the old man’s sighs, the glass took on the aspect of the sea and of night, those two ancient friends of hearts stricken by loneliness.

For a time he drugged himself with the vision. But the street lamp overhead, shining red behind him through the cold fog, seemed to him, when it was cast back to the depths of this fearsome glass, like the blood-coloured gleam of a lighthouse, pointing the track of shipwreck to the lost vessel of his future.

He shook off this nightmare, drew himself to the full height of his tall figure, and gave vent to a burst of false and bitter laughter which made the two policemen start, over there under the trees. Fortunately for the artist, the latter imagined it must be some stray drunkard, or some deceived lover perhaps, and continued their official progress without attributing any further importance to the unhappy Chaudval.

‘Well, we must face it!’ he said simply, in a low voice, like the condemned man, suddenly roused from sleep, who says to the hangman: “I am at your service sir!’

And straightway the old actor ventured forth into a monologue, with the stupefaction of mental prostration.

‘I have acted prudently enough,’ he went on, ‘for I asked my good friend Mlle. Pinson (who has access to the Minister, and to his pillow as well) to obtain for me, between two passionate avowals, that post as lighthouse-keeper which my father enjoyed on the ocean coast. And stop! I see now the strange effect that street lamp produced on me in the mirror! It was my underlying thought. —The Pinson will be sending me my authorization, there’s no doubt. And then I shall retreat into my lighthouse like a rat in a cheese. I shall light the way for vessels afar off, away at sea. A lighthouse! It always strikes the note for a good background. I am alone in the world: decidedly, it is the most fitting asylum for my declining days. ’

Suddenly Chaudval broke off his reverie.

‘Ah, wait a moment!’ he said, one hand feeling his chest beneath his cloak. ‘That letter the postman brought just as I was coming out—it’s the answer, no doubt? Why, I was just going into the café to read it, and I forgot!—Really, I am breaking up!—Good! Here it is. ’

Chaudval had just drawn a large envelope from his pocket.