SHOUTS AND MURMURS
i8o adieus,
you
see her trying to introduce them,
as the curtain falls
and
you hear her saying Monsieur Armand Duval."
"Jean-Gaspard Deburau
—
The Third Act The
scene
is
seven years later in the garret
where Deburau dwells with
his son Charles^
now
a strapping fellow of seventeen. Poor Deburau,
and half sick in body, has been absent these six months from the cast at the Funambules. It is the more disturbing, therefore, for him to learn that his son, who has always been his prompter and his most devoted audience,
sick in spirit
now
aspires himself to play Pierrot and, with the
callousness of youth, actually thinks of doing so
under the name of Deburau. foot
down
hard, yet he
boy has only
to wait.
The
elder puts his
knows uneasily that the
It is crushing for the father
had daily hoped Marie comes tripping in at last,
to learn, too, that when, as he for seven years,
she does so not as one keeping a tryst, but in the
mood
Lady Bountiful, hoping him with her gay stories of how the bullying Duval, pere, had tried vainly to take her of a sympathetic
to cheer
Armand from a doctor who
and determined to smuggle in shall patch up her dear old friend her,