Chat at table, the chat of love: it is as impossible to reproduce one as the other. Love-talk is a cloud; table-talk is smoke. Fameuil and Dahlia hum. Tholomyès drinks. Zéphine laughs, Fantine smiles, Listolier blows a wooden trumpet bought at Saint-Cloud. Favourite gazes tenderly at Blachevelle and says she adores him. That calls forth his question: what would she do if he ceased to love her? She cries out that he must not say that even in jest. She would spring after him, scratch him, rend him, throw him into the water, have him arrested. She would scream to the police. She would not restrain herself at all. Rabble. Blachevelle throws himself back in his chair, in an ecstasy, and closes both eyes proudly. The threat has done the work of a caress.
Dahlia, eating, asks in a low voice, amid the uproar, whether Favourite really idolises that Blachevelle of hers so deeply. Favourite, in the same tone, seizing her fork again, says she detests him. He is avaricious. She loves the little fellow opposite her in her house, very nice, an actor by profession. His mother tells him he is splitting her head; he goes up to rat-ridden garrets and sings so that he can be heard downstairs. He earns twenty sous a day penning quibbles for an attorney. One day, seeing her make batter, he told her to make her gloves into fritters and he would eat them. Only artists say such things. She is in a fair way to go out of her head over that little fellow. Never mind: she tells Blachevelle that she adores him. How she lies. Hey. How she does lie.
She pauses, then goes on. She is sad. It has done nothing but rain all summer. The wind irritates her. Blachevelle is very stingy. There are hardly any green peas in the market. She has the spleen, as the English say; butter is so dear. And then it is horrible: here they are dining in a room with a bed in it, and that disgusts her with life.
Coming Up in Chapter 34
While some sing, the rest talk all at once; it is no longer anything but noise. Tholomyès intervenes. Let us not talk at random, he says. No zeal, gentlemen. Blachevelle tells him to leave them in peace. Fameuil cries, Down with the tyrant.
