are
exhibited like two huge masses of black backs, variegated costumes,
jostling and squeezing in their struggles to look. Constance, usually so
retiring, makes her way into the front row, listens to the discussions,
catches on the wing snatches of sentences, technical phrases which she
remembers, nods her head approvingly, smiles, shrugs her shoulders when
she hears any slighting remark, longing to crush the first person who
should fail to admire.

Whether it be the excellent Crenmitz or another, you always see, at the
opening of the Salon, that shadow prowling furtively about where people
are conversing, with ears on the alert and an anxious expression;
sometimes it is an old father who thanks you with a glance for a kindly
word said in passing, or assumes a despairing expression at the epigram
which you hurl at a work of art and which strikes a heart behind you. A
face not to be omitted surely, if ever some painter in love with things
modern should conceive the idea of reproducing on canvas that perfectly
typical manifestation of Parisian life, the opening of the Salon in that
vast hothouse of statuary, with the yellow gravelled paths and the great
glass ceiling, beneath which, half-way from the floor, the galleries of
the first tier stand forth, lined with heads bending over to look, and
with extemporized waving draperies.

In a light that seems slightly cold and pale as it falls on the green
decorations of the walls, where the rays become rarefied, one would say,
in order to afford the spectators an opportunity for concentration and
accuracy of vision, the crowd moves slowly back and forth, pauses,
scatters over the benches, divided into groups, and yet mingling castes
more thoroughly than any other gathering, just as the fickle and
changing weather, at that time of year, brings together all sorts of
costumes, so that the black lace and superb train of the great lady who
has come to observe the effect of her own portrait rub against the
Siberian furs of the actress who has just returned from Russia and
proposes that everybody shall know it.

Here there are no boxes, no reserved seats, and that is what gives such
abiding interest and charm to this first view in broad daylight. The
real society women can pass judgment at close quarters on the painted
beauties that excite so much applause by artificial light; the tiny hat,
latest shape, of the Marquise de Bois-l'Hery and her like brushes
against the more than modes