nd hidden at the back of a _baignoire_ in the auditorium. I
had drawn up the golden grille, by which the occupants of a _baignoire_
may screen themselves from the curiosity of the _parterre_. I felt like
some caged Eastern odalisque, and I liked so to feel. I liked to exist
solely for him, to be mysterious, and to baffle the general gaze in order
to be more precious to him. Ah, how I had changed! How he had changed me!

It was Thursday, a subscription night, and, in addition, all Paris was in
the theatre, a crowded company of celebrities, of experts, and of
perfectly-dressed women. And no one knew who I was, nor why I was there.
The vogue of a musician may be universal, but the vogue of an English
writer is nothing beyond England and America. I had not been to a
rehearsal. I had not met Villedo, nor even the translator of my verse. I
had wished to remain in the background, and Diaz had not crossed me. Thus
I gazed through the bars of my little cell across the rows of bald heads,
and wonderful coiffures, and the waving arms of the conductor, and the
restless, gliding bows of the violinists, and saw a scene which was
absolutely strange and new to me. And it seemed amazing that these
figures which I saw moving and chanting with such grace in a palace
garden, authentic to the last detail of historical accuracy, were my La
Valliere and my Louis, and that this rich and coloured music which I
heard was the same that Diaz had sketched for me on the piano, from
illegible scraps of ruled paper, on the edge of the forest. The full
miracle of operatic art was revealed to me for the first time.

And when the curtain fell on the opening act, the intoxicating human
quality of an operatic success was equally revealed to me for the first
time. How cold and distant the success of a novelist compared to this!
The auditorium was suddenly bathed in bright light, and every listening
face awoke to life as from an enchantment, and flushed and smiled, and
the delicatest hands in France clapped to swell the mighty uproar that
filled the theatre with praise. Paris, upstanding on its feet, and
leaning over balconies and cheering, was charmed and delighted by the
fable and the music, in which it found nothing but the sober and pretty
elegance that it loves. And Paris applauded feverishly, and yet with a
full sense of the value of its applause--given there in the only French
theatre where the claque has been suppressed. And then the curtain rose,
an