A splendid house, crammed to the roof, notwithstanding the late period of the spring and the fashionable taste for early departure to the country; a house that Cardailhac, a declared enemy of nature and the country, endeavouring always to keep Parisians in Paris till the latest possible date, has succeeded in crowding and making as brilliant as in midwinter. Fifteen hundred heads are swarming beneath the great central chandelier, erect—bent forward—turning round—questioning amid a great play of shadows and reflections; some massed in the obscure corners of the floor, others in a bright light reflected through the open doors of the boxes from the white walls of the corridor; the first-night public which is always the same, that brigand-like tout Paris which goes everywhere, carrying those envied places by storm when a favour or a claim by right of some official position fails to secure them.
In the stalls are low-cut waistcoats, clubmen, shining bald heads, wide partings in scanty hair, light-coloured gloves, big opera-glasses raised and directed towards various points. In the galleries a mixture of different social sets and all kinds of dress, all the people well known as figuring at this kind of solemnity, and the embarrassing promiscuity which places the modest smile of the virtuous woman along-side of the black-ringed eyes, the vermilion-painted lips of her who belongs to another category. White hats, pink hats, diamonds and paint. Above, the boxes present the same confusion; actresses and women of the demi-monde, ministers, ambassadors, famous authors, critics—these last wearing a grave air and frowning brow, sitting crosswise in their fauteuils with the impassive haughtiness of judges whom nothing can corrupt. The boxes near the stage especially stand out in the general picture brilliantly lighted, occupied by celebrities of the financial world, the women decollete and with bare arms, glittering with jewels like the Queen of Sheba on her visit to the King of Judea. But on the left, one of these large boxes, entirely empty, attracts attention by reason of its curious decoration, lighted from the back by a Moorish lantern. Over the whole assembly is an impalpable and floating dust, the flickering of the gas, that odour that mingles with all the pleasures of Paris, its little sputterings, sharp and quick like the breaths drawn by a consumptive, accompanying the movement of opened fans. And then, too, ennui, a gloomy ennui, the ennui of seeing the same faces always in the same places, with their defects or their poses, that uniformity of fashionable gatherings which ends by establishing in Paris each winter a spiteful and gossiping provincialism more petty than that of the provinces themselves.
Maranne observed this ill-humour, this lassitude of the public, and thinking of all the changes which the success of his play might bring about in his simple life, he asked himself, full of a great anxiety, what he could do to bring his ideas home to those thousands of people, to pluck them away from their preoccupation, and to send through this crowd a single current which should draw to himself those absent glances, those minds of every different calibre, so difficult to move to unison. Instinctively his eyes sought friendly faces, a box facing the stage occupied by the Joyeuse family; Elise and the younger girls seated in the front, Aline and the father in the row behind—a charming family group, like a bouquet wet with dew amid a display of artificial flowers. And while all Paris was disdainfully asking, “Who are those people there?” the poet instrusted his fate to those little fairy hands, new gloved for the occasion, which very soon would boldly give the signal for applause.
The curtain is going up! Maranne has barely time to spring into the wings; and suddenly he hears as from far, very far away, the first words of his play, which rise, like a flight of timid birds, into the silence and immensity of the theatre. A terrible moment. Where should he go? What should he do? Remain there leaning against a wing, with straining ear and beating heart? Encourage the actors when he himself stood in so much need of encouragement? He prefers rather to look the peril in the face; and by the little door communicating with the corridor behind the boxes he slips out to a corner box, which he orders to be opened for him softly. “Sh! It is I.” Some one is seated in the shadow—a woman, she whom all Paris knows and who is hiding herself from the public gaze. Andre sits down by her side, and so, close to one another, mother and son tremblingly watch the progress of the play.
It astonished the audience at first. This Theatre des Nouveautes, situated in the very heart of the boulevard, where its portico glitters all illuminated among the great restaurants of the smart clubs; this theatre, to which people were accustomed to come in parties after a luxurious dinner to listen until supper-time to an act or two of some suggestive piece, had become in the hands of its clever manager the most fashionable of all Parisian entertainments, without any very precise character of its own, and partaking something of all, from the fairy-operetta which exhibits undressed women, to the serious modern drama. Cardailhac was especially anxious to justify his title of “Manager of the Nouveautes,” and, since the Nabob’s millions had been at the back of the undertaking, had made a point of preparing for the boulevardiers the most dazzling surprises. That of this evening surpassed them all; the piece was in verse—and moral.
A moral play!
The old rogue had realized that the moment had arrived to try that effect, and he was trying it. After the astonishment of the first minutes, a few disappointed exclamations here and there in the boxes, “Why, it is in verse!” the house began to feel the charm of this invigorating and healthy piece, as if there had been sprinkled on it, in its rarefied atmosphere, some fresh and pungent essence, an elixir of life perfumed with thyme from the hillside.
“Ah! this is nice—it is restful.”
Such was the general sense, a thrill of ease, a spasm of pleasure accompanying each line. That fat old Hemerlingue found it restful, puffing in his stage-box on the ground floor as in a trough of cerise satin. It was restful also to that tall Suzanne Bloch, her hair dressed in the antique way, ringlets flowing over a diadem of gold; and near her, Amy Ferat, all in white like a bride and with sprigs of orange-blossom in her fluffy hair, it was restful to her also, you may be sure.
A crowd of demi-mondaines were present, some very fat, with a dirty greasiness acquired in a hundred seraglios, three chins, and an air of stupidity; others absolutely green in spite of their paint, as if they had been dipped in a bath of that arsenate of copper which is called in the shops “Paris green.” These were wrinkled, faded to such a degree that they hid in the back of their boxes, only allowing a portion of a white arm to be seen, a rounded shoulder protruding. Then there were young men about town, flabby and without backbone, those who at that time used to be called petits creves, creatures worn out by dissipation, with stooping necks and drooping lids, incapable of standing erect or of articulating a single word perfectly. And all these people exclaimed with one accord: “This is nice—it is restful.” The handsome Moessard murmured it like a refrain beneath his little fair mustache, while his queen in the stage-box translated it into the barbarism of her foreign tongue. Positively they found it restful. They did not say after what—after what heart-breaking labour, after what forced, idle and useless task.