You suggest two in the third row.
“Bon,” replies madame, approvingly. She dips a pen in violet ink and writes carefully upon a checklike document the numbers of the chosen seats, tears this check from its stub, blots it, and scratches the corresponding numbers from the diagram. “Voilà, Monsieur,” and she hands you your ticket. Then she dives into the pocket of her petticoat for the key to a money-drawer from which to make your change. Finally, as you raise your hat to go, she adds, in parting assurance, with a little shrug of her shoulders beneath her worsted shawl: “I am sure Monsieur will find the seats excellent; I should have chosen them myself.”
All this takes time, but I must confess that I like the pantry method better than having my change blown at me through the pigeon-window of a draughty box-office, with the last rear seats in the house slapped out to me, all the desirable ones being in the mercenary hands of a band of sidewalk pirates.
LAMY IN “LA CAROTTE” AT THE PALAIS ROYAL
Drawing by BARRÈRE
Meanwhile, several newcomers are crowding about the table, among them three well-groomed men in top hats and frock coats, evidently having strolled over from their club, and a faultlessly dressed old baron, with a tea rose in his button-hole, who is now leaning over the desk, poring over the diagram through his black-rimmed monocle.
It is the first night of the new revue. This well-fed old baron! His beard is grizzled now and his bald pate shines beneath the rim of his stove-pipe hat. How many revues has he seen in his Parisian life! How many capricious débutantes of café concerts and the theater has he known! How many has he seen flash into brilliant stars and then grow old and fade away! Some of them are staid old concierges now knitting away the short remnant of their lives. Some of them died young as roses will under gas-light. Les petites femmes! Ah! the good old days of the Palais Royal! The Orangerie! or the Tuileries and the Jardin Mabille! The days of brocades, of cashmeres, and pendent jewelry of malachite and old mine diamonds! What famous beauties then! and how they could wear their flounces and furbelows—the little minxes! What a reckless riot of costly gaiety! How much baccarat at the clubs! How many suppers at Bignon’s and the Maison Dorée! How many years of all this! and yet on this sunny afternoon this old baron is as eager as a schoolboy over the new burlesque, and so he strolls out with his ticket up the Champs-Élysées, stopping for a full half hour to watch the Guignol and the children and the nurses. Later you will see him rolling through the Bois in his victoria, a queenly woman in black by his side, the tea-rose stuck jauntily under the turquoise collar of a sleek red spaniel in her lap. The baron is smoking. There is no conversation.
You will hear Polin at the Alcazar. He comes on at the end of a preliminary program of excellent variety before the revue. Fat jolly old Polin, whose song creations portray the happy-go-lucky lot of the common soldier. He reels in from the wings, convulsed with laughter over some recent adventure, the result of which has put him in the guard-house for ten days. He is fairly bursting his red-trousered uniform with merriment as he begins his first verse. He tells you every detail of his experience, painfully even, for he is now crying with laughter, his voice rising in little squeaks like the water in a pump and bubbling over as he reaches the point. He is manipulating the while a red cotton handkerchief, which is never still; now it mops his round genial face, now it is twisted nervously into a rope and jammed into his trousers’ pocket, and as speedily taken out to dust his knees. His last verse is smothered in chuckling glee; little jets of cleverly chosen words manage, however, to get over the footlights to his listeners. The song ends amid a thunder of applause and Polin bows awkwardly and retreats with his back to the audience, his cavalry boots combined with his red trousers flopping as he goes.
Photo by Reutlinger, Paris