His illusions crushed, the humiliation of a refusal, the jests of his comrades, the bill at the cafe where he had breakfasted on credit during the whole period of his managership, a bill which must be paid--all these things occurred to him in the silence and gloom of the five flights he had to climb.

His heart was torn.

Even so, the actor's nature was so strong in him that he deemed it his duty to envelop his distress, genuine as it was, in a conventional tragic mask.
As he entered, he paused, cast an ominous glance around the work-room, at the table covered with work, his little supper waiting for him in a corner, and the two dear, anxious faces looking up at him with glistening eyes.

He stood a full minute without speaking--and you know how long a minute's silence seems on the stage; then he took three steps forward, sank upon a low chair beside the table, and exclaimed in a hissing voice: "Ah! I am accursed!" At the same time he dealt the table such a terrible blow with his fist that the "birds and insects for ornament" flew to the four corners of the room.

His terrified wife rose and timidly approached him, while Desiree half rose in her armchair with an expression of nervous agony that distorted all her features.
Lolling in his chair, his arms hanging despondently by his sides, his head on his chest, the actor soliloquized--a fragmentary soliloquy, interrupted by sighs and dramatic hiccoughs, overflowing with imprecations against the pitiless, selfish bourgeois, those monsters to whom the artist gives his flesh and blood for food and drink.
Then he reviewed his whole theatrical life, his early triumphs, the golden wreath from the subscribers at Alencon, his marriage to this "sainted woman," and he pointed to the poor creature who stood by his side, with tears streaming from her eyes, and trembling lips, nodding her head dotingly at every word her husband said.
In very truth, a person who never had heard of the illustrious Delobelle could have told his history in detail after that long monologue.