corridors, and find ourselves in a room incredibly small
for a theatre--a mere little box of a place, not wider, I should
judge, than sixteen feet, nor more than fifty feet deep, but so
curiously and ingeniously arranged with seats in tiers upon an
inclined plane that quite a numerous audience can find room within it.
The "fauteuils d'orchestre," or orchestra-chairs, are the front row of
benches, nearest the stage. The "parterre" is the back rows. There is
a little bird's nest of a gallery at the rear of the room, where the
spectators cannot stand up without striking the ceiling with their
heads. At the sides of the space set apart for the musicians are two
queer little private boxes, perched up against the wall like
old-fashioned pulpits, and reached by a narrow flight of steps like a
ladder. The aristocratic seats (after the boxes) are the fauteuils
d'orchestre, for which we pay the ruinous sum of twenty-five sous
each. Here we are in an atmosphere utterly unlike that of the beuglant
just described, for this is a place where the honest blousard comes
with his wife and children for an evening of innocent amusement.
Directly behind us sits a family of three generations--a bent old man
of seventy-five or eighty years, gray-haired and venerable; a
round-faced, middle-aged blousard with his dark-eyed wife; and their
two little babies, scarcely old enough to prattle, and who lisp their
delight with beaming eyes to "dan'pere." Next me is a bright-eyed boy
of four years, with clustering curls about his fair forehead, who sits
bolt upright in his mother's lap and comments in subdued but earnest
tones on the performers on the stage. "Pou'quoi fait-on ca?" ("What
are they doing that for?") is his favorite question during the
evening, varied by the frequent and anxious remark, "Mais, c'n'est pa'
encore fini?" ("But it is not yet finished?"). A cat is asleep on the
steps of the private box at the left. Neither of the boxes is
tenanted, by the way, as they are inordinately expensive--fifty sous
each occupant, or some such heavy sum of money. Under one of them
there is a cozy cupboard, where the woman-usher (in a neat muslin cap
with pink ribbons) keeps the candies and cakes she sells to the
audience between the acts. Upon the poor little profits of her office
here this honest woman lives, and keeps herself as tidy as if she had
ample pin-money. She thrusts a little wooden footstool under the feet
of each woman in the audience, and i