almost balmy and the house was full of a restless audience canning itself with handkerchiefs and handbills. The thick white paint was melting on my face as I put it on.
I wore a pasteboard sword with Nicolas's best velvet coat, and I was trembling before I stepped on the stage thinking, 'This is like waiting to be executed or something.'
But as soon as I stepped out there, I turned and looked directly into the jam-packed hall and the strangest thing happened. The fear evaporated.
I beamed at the audience and very slowly I bowed. I stared at the lovely Flaminia as if I were seeing her for the first time. I had to win her. The romp began.
The stage belonged to me as it had years and years ago in that far-off" country town. And as we pranced madly together across the boards -- quarreling, embracing, clowning -- laughter rocked the house.
I could feel the attention as if it were an embrace. Each gesture, each line brought a roar from the audience -- it was too easy almost -- and we could have worked it for another half hour if the other actors, eager to get into the next trick as they called it, hadn't forced us finally towards the wings.
The crowd was standing up to applaud us. And it wasn't that country audience under the open sky. These were Parisians shouting for Lelio and Flaminia to come back out.
In the shadows off the wings, I reeled. I almost collapsed. I could not see anything for the moment but the vision of the audience gazing up at me over the footlights. I wanted to go right back on stage. I grabbed Flanunia and kissed her and realized that she was kissing me back passionately.
Then Renaud, the old manager, pulled her away.
"All right, Lestat," he said as if he were cross about something. "All right, you've done tolerably well, I'm going to let you go on regularly from now on."
But before I could start jumping up and down for joy, half the troup materialized around us. And Luchina, one of the actresses, immediately spoke up.
"Oh no, you'll not let him go on regularly" she said. "He's the handsomest actor on the boulevard du Temple and you'll hire him outright for it, and pay him outright for it, and he doesn't touch another broom or mop." I was terrified. My career had just started and it was about to be over, but to my amazement Renaud agreed to all her terms.
Of course I was very flattered to be called handsome, and I understood as I had years ago that Lelio, the lover, is supposed to have considerable style. An aristocrat with any breeding whatsoever was perfect for the part.
But if I was going to make the Paris audiences really notice me, if I was going to have them talking about me at the Comedic-Francaise, I had to be more than some yellow-haired angel fallen out of a marquis's family onto the stage. I had to be a great actor, and that is exactly what I determined to be.
That night Nicolas and I celebrated with a colossal drunk. We had all the troupe up to our rooms for it, and I climbed out on the slippery rooftops and opened my arms to Paris and Nicolas played his violin in the window until we'd awakened the whole neighborhood.
The music was rapturous, yet people were snarling and screaming up the alleyways, and banging on pots and pans. We paid no attention. We were dancing and singing as we had in the witches' place. I almost fell off the window ledge.
The next day, bottle in hand, I dictated the whole story to the Italian letter writer in the stinking sunshine in les Innocents and saw that the letter went off to my mother at once. I wanted to embrace everybody I saw in the streets. I was Lelio. I was an actor.
By September I had my name on the handbills. And I sent those to my mother, too.
And we weren't doing the old commedia. We were performing a farce by a famous writer who, on account of a general playwrights' strike, couldn't get it performed at the Comedie-Francaise.
Of course we couldn't say his name, but everyone knew it was his work, and half the court was packing Renaud's House of Thesbians every night.
I wasn't the lead, but I was the young lover, a sort of Lelio again really, which was almost better than the lead, and I