according to
Russian style, the building was laid out like barracks and about seven
hundred persons live in it, most of them employed about the theater.
The two stages were built by a German architect under the inspection
of the General whose peremptory suggestions were frequent and
injurious. Both the great theater as it is called, which has four
rows of boxes, and can contain six thousand auditors, and the Variete
theater which is very much smaller, are fitted out with all sorts of
apparatus that ever belonged to a stage. In fact, new machinery has
in many cases been invented for them and proved totally useless. The
Russian often hits upon queer notions when he tries to show his gifts.

On one side a very large and strong bridge has been erected leading
from the street to the stage, to be used whenever the piece requires
large bodies of cavalry to make their appearance, and there are
machines that can convey persons with the swiftness of lightning down
from the sky above the stage, a distance of 56 feet. A machine for
which a ballet has been composed surpasses everything I ever saw in
its size; it serves to transport eighty persons together on a seeming
cloud from the roof to the foot-lights. I was astonished by it when I
first beheld it although I had seen the machines of the grand opera at
Paris: the second time I reflected that it alone cost 40,000 florins
[$16,000].

Under the management of two Russian Generals, who have hitherto been
at the head of the establishment, a vast deal has in this way been
accomplished for mere external show.

The great Russian theatre of St. Petersburg has served for a model,
and accordingly nothing has really been improved except that part of
the performance which is farthest removed from genuine art, namely
the ballet. That fact is that out of Paris the ballet is nowhere
so splendid as in the great theater at Warsaw, not even at St.
Petersburg, for the reason that the Russian is inferior to the Pole in
physical beauty and grace. Heretofore the corps of the St. Petersburg
ballet has twice been composed of Poles, but this arrangement has been
abandoned as derogatory to the national honor. The sensual attractions
of the ballet render it the most important thing in the theater. A
great school for dancers has been established, where pupils may be
found from three to eighteen years old. It is painful to see the
little creatures, hardly weaned from their mothers' breasts--twisted
and t