Imaginary LIves by Marcel Schwob

gallows and hanged. His body grew sun-burned after a time, for the hangman took his jacket, his green sleeves and the fine cloth cape trimmed with fur which he had stolen out of a tavern.
     
     

GABRIEL SPENCER
    Actor
     
     
    His mother was a woman named Flum who had a little basement in Piked Hatch at the end of Rotten Row. After supper a captain with brass rings on his fingers used to come to see her, along with two gallants in loosened doublets. Flum lodged three girls named Poll, Doll and Moll, and none of them could stand the smell of tobacco. Frequently when they retired to the rooms above, the polite gentlemen would accompany them after first taking a glass of Spanish wine to wash away the taste of their pipes. Little Gabriel used to sit on the hearth watching them roast apples to put in their ale pots.
    Actors of all sorts came there too – actors who dared not show themselves in the big taverns where the famous entertainers went. Some of them boasted in the grand manner, others stuttered like idiots. They often played with Gabriel, teaching him tragic verse and rustic jokes, and once they gave him a scrap of gilt-fringed crimson drapery with a velvet mask and an old wooden dagger. Then he paraded up and down all alone in front of the fireplace until his mother’s triple chins shook in a quiver of admiration for her precocious child.
    Later on the actors took him to the Green Curtain in Shoreditch, where he trembled to see the excessive rage of a little comedian hurling his way through the rôle of Jeronimo. They showed him old King Lear with his wild white beard, kneeling for pardon before his daughter Cordelia. A clown imitated the follies of Tarlton, while another, wrapped in a bed quilt, terrified Prince Hamlet. Sir John Oldcastle made everybody laugh with his fat belly, most of all when he snatched his hostess around the waist while she permitted him to rumple her bonnet and slide his fat fingers into the buckram sack hanging from her belt. The fool sang songs the idiot never could understand. A clown in a cotton hat kept sticking his head out from behind the wings to make faces. They had a juggler, too, with monkeys, and a man dressed up like a woman, whom Gabriel thought looked like his mother, and whom the beadles with their tall maces came stalking to at the end of the piece, dressing him in a rich blue robe, declaring they would carry him off to Bridewell.
    When Gabriel was fifteen the Green Curtain players noticed that he was pretty and slim enough to play the parts of women or young girls. He had very white skin and large eyes under fine arched brows. Combing down his unruly black hair, Flum pierced his ears to hold a pair of imitation double pearls. He joined the Duke of Nottingham’s troupe where he was given dresses of taffeta and damask with spangles of gold and silver foil, laced corsets, and hempen wigs with long curls. During rehearsals they taught him to act. He blushed at first when he found himself on the stage, but he was soon responding mincingly to gallantries. Bustling with excitement, Flum brought Poll, Doll and Moll to see him. He must really be a girl, they declared, laughing, and they said they certainly meant to unlace him after the play. They took him back to Piked Hatch, where his mother made him put on one of his dresses to show the captain, who begged him a thousand mock pardons as he placed a cheap gold plated ring set with a glass carbuncle on his finger.
    Gabriel Spencer’s best friends were William Bird, Edward Juby and the two Jeffs. One summer they toured the countryside with a company of vagabond actors, traveling in a tilt-covered wagon that served them also as a shelter when they halted for the night. On the way to Hammersmith one evening, a man stepped out of the roadside ditch and showed them the muzzle of a pistol.
    “Your money!” he demanded. “I am Gamaliel Ratsey, highwayman, by the grace of God... and I don’t like to wait.”
    The two Jeffs responded