title of the play, and also from the colour of the bills, still damp and
wrinkled with paste, on which those words stood out. Nothing, unless
it were such strange titles as the _Testament de Cesar Girodot, or
Oedipe-Roi_, inscribed not on the green bills of the Opera-Comique, but
on the wine-coloured bills of the Comedie-Francaise, nothing seemed
to me to differ more profoundly from the sparkling white plume of
the _Diamants de la Couronne_ than the sleek, mysterious satin of the
_Domino Noir_; and since my parents had told me that, for my first visit
to the theatre, I should have to choose between these two pieces, I
would study exhaustively and in turn the title of one and the title
of the other (for those were all that I knew of either), attempting to
snatch from each a foretaste of the pleasure which it offered me, and to
compare this pleasure with that latent in the other title, until in the
end I had shewn myself such vivid, such compelling pictures of, on
the one hand, a play of dazzling arrogance, and on the other a gentle,
velvety play, that I was as little capable of deciding which play I
should prefer to see as if, at the dinner-table, they had obliged me to
choose between _rice a l'Imperatrice_ and the famous cream of chocolate.

All my conversations with my playfellows bore upon actors, whose art,
although as yet I had no experience of it, was the first of all its
numberless forms in which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its
enjoyment. Between one actor's tricks of intonation and inflection and
another's, the most trifling differences would strike me as being of an
incalculable importance. And from what I had been told of them I would
arrange them in the order of their talent in lists which I used to
murmur to myself all day long: lists which in the end became petrified
in my brain and were a source of annoyance to it, being irremovable.

And later, in my schooldays, whenever I ventured in class, when the
master's head was turned, to communicate with some new friend, I would
always begin by asking him whether he had begun yet to go to theatres,
and if he agreed that our greatest actor was undoubtedly Got, our second
Delaunay, and so on. And if, in his judgment, Febvre came below Thiron,
or Delaunay below Coquelin, the sudden volatility which the name of
Coquelin, forsaking its stony rigidity, would engender in my mind, in
which it moved upwards to the second place, the rich vitality with which
the nam