moderate fit of laughter shook
the whole house. While they were dancing Phoebus treated Minerva to
salad bowls of negus, and Neptune sat in state among seven or eight
women who regaled him with cakes. Allusions were eagerly caught;
indecent meanings were attached to them; harmless phrases were diverted
from their proper significations in the light of exclamations issuing
from the stalls. For a long time past the theatrical public had not
wallowed in folly more irreverent. It rested them.

Nevertheless, the action of the piece advanced amid these fooleries.
Vulcan, as an elegant young man clad, down to his gloves, entirely in
yellow and with an eyeglass stuck in his eye, was forever running after
Venus, who at last made her appearance as a fishwife, a kerchief on her
head and her bosom, covered with big gold trinkets, in great evidence.
Nana was so white and plump and looked so natural in a part demanding
wide hips and a voluptuous mouth that she straightway won the whole
house. On her account Rose Mignon was forgotten, though she was made up
as a delicious baby, with a wicker-work burlet on her head and a short
muslin frock and had just sighed forth Diana's plaints in a sweetly
pretty voice. The other one, the big wench who slapped her thighs and
clucked like a hen, shed round her an odor of life, a sovereign feminine
charm, with which the public grew intoxicated. From the second act
onward everything was permitted her. She might hold herself awkwardly;
she might fail to sing some note in tune; she might forget her words--it
mattered not: she had only to turn and laugh to raise shouts of
applause. When she gave her famous kick from the hip the stalls were
fired, and a glow of passion rose upward, upward, from gallery to
gallery, till it reached the gods. It was a triumph, too, when she led
the dance. She was at home in that: hand on hip, she enthroned Venus
in the gutter by the pavement side. And the music seemed made for her
plebeian voice--shrill, piping music, with reminiscences of Saint-Cloud
Fair, wheezings of clarinets and playful trills on the part of the
little flutes.

Two numbers were again encored. The opening waltz, that waltz with the
naughty rhythmic beat, had returned and swept the gods with it. Juno,
as a peasant woman, caught Jupiter and his little laundress cleverly
and boxed his ears. Diana, surprising Venus in the act of making an
assignation with Mars, made haste to indicate hour and place to Vulca