“Qué! we are nice here, qué! But do haul up your veil—don’t tremble so, there is no danger wid me!”
The young girl did not answer, still overwhelmed by the impression of that slow, insulting crowd of strollers where she had been confounded with the rest, among all those livid masks of women. And behold, right in front of her, she found those horrible masks once more, with their blood-stained lips—found them in the grimacing faces of two clowns in tights who were dislocating all their joints, a bell in each hand with which they were sounding out, whilst they frolicked about, an air from “Martha”—a veritable music of the gnomes, formless and stuttering, very much in its place in the musical babel of the skating-rink. Then the curtain fell again, and for the tenth time the peasant girl stood up and sat down again, fussed about, fixed her head-dress anew and suddenly exclaimed, as she looked down the programme: “There, the Cordova Mount—the summer locusts, the farandole—there, there, it is beginning, vé, vé!”
Rising once more, the curtain displayed upon the background of the scenery a lilac mountain, up which mounted buildings of stone most weird in construction, partly castle, partly mosque, here a minaret and there a terrace; they rose in ogival arches, crenelations and Moorish work, with aloes and palm-trees of zinc rising at the foot of towers sharply cut against the indigo blue of a very crude sky. One may see just such absurd architecture in the suburbs of Paris among villas inhabited by newly enriched merchants. In spite of all, in spite of the crying tones of the slopes blossoming with thyme and exotic plants placed there by mistake because of the word “Cordova,” Hortense was rather embarrassed at sight of that landscape which held for her the most delightful recollections. And that palace of the Turk perched upon the mountain all rose-colored porphyry, and that reconstructed castle, really did seem to her the realization of her dreams, but quite grotesque and overdone, as it happens when one’s dream is about to slip into the oppression of a nightmare.
At a signal from the orchestra and from an electric jet, long devil’s-darning-needles, personated by girls in an undress of tightly-fitting silks, a sort of emerald-green tights, rushed upon the stage waving their long membranous wings and whirling their wooden rattles.
“What! those are locusts? Not much!” said the Provençal girl indignantly.
Already they had arranged themselves in a half circle, like a crescent-shaped mass of seaweed, all the time whirling their rattles, which sounded very distinctly now, because the row made by the parlor skates was softened and for a moment the noise of the lobby was hushed in a close wall of heads leaning toward the stage, their eyes glaring under every kind of head-dress in the world. The wretchedness which tore Hortense’s heart grew deeper when she heard coming, at first from afar and gradually increasing, the low sound of the tabor.
She would have liked to flee in order not to have seen what was coming. In its turn the shepherd’s pipe sounded out its high notes and the farandole, raising under the cadence of its regular steps a thick dust the color of the earth, unrolled itself with all the fantastic costumes imaginable, short skirts meant to lure the eye, red stockings with gold borders, spangled waists, head-dresses of Arab coins, of Indian scarfs, of Italian kerchiefs or those from Brittany or Caux, all worn with a fine Parisian disdain of truth to locality.
Behind them, pushing forward on his knee a tabor covered with gold paper, came the great troubadour of the placards—his legs incased in tights, one leg yellow with a blue shoe on and one leg blue shod in yellow, with his satin waistcoat covered with puffs and his crenelated velvet cap overshadowing a countenance which remained quite brown despite cosmetics, and of which nothing could be seen well except a big moustache stiffened with Hungarian pomade.
“Ah!” said Audiberte in perfect ecstasy.
When the farandole had taken up its place on the two sides of the stage in front of the locusts with their big wings, the troubadour, standing alone in the centre, saluted with an air of assurance and victory under the glaring eyes of the Eternal Father whose rays poured a luminous hoarfrost upon his coat.