Chapter Eight
GREASE PAINT AND POWDER PUFFS
The stage of the Folies Bergère during a spectacular revue is a busy place. Sunday evening is always a crowded night at Parisian theaters and a hard one upon players, since all the theaters on that day give matinées as well.
There are few persons in an audience who realize the amount of hard work required of every one behind the scenes in the staging and playing of a spectacular revue.
It was nine o’clock Sunday evening and the revue at the Folies Bergère was about to begin, as my friend, a successful writer of many Parisian revues, Monsieur René Louis, led me through the crowded promenoir of this thoroughly Parisian music-hall and through a small iron door into another world. I say another world, for it was peopled with fairies—coryphées in pink tights whose eyes were stenciled and lined with blue until they appeared as almond-shaped as an odalisque’s. The stage was crowded with scene-shifters in black caps and long white linen dusters, with ladies protected from stray drafts by warm woolen dressing gowns, with hair-dressers in their shirt-sleeves, with firemen in shining brass helmets, with ballet girls in white tulle and fleshings, and pink satin slippers with padded toes.
We came upon all this suddenly, for, as we entered the iron door leading to the coulisses, we found ourselves in a small entresol and in the midst of a dozen coryphées who were giving a final touch to their make-up before an extra mirror.
The air was heavy with the odor of scores of different cheap perfumes.
Down a narrow winding stairway leading from the dressing-rooms above, poured a stream of other coryphées, principals, ballet girls and figurantes, a moving kaleidoscopic procession of pink tights, glittering tinsel and bizarre head-dresses.
Groups of chorus girls gossiped in safe corners out of the way of hurrying scene-shifters.
“Attention! s’il vous plait,” shouted two of the latter as they dodged past with a section of a Venetian palace, while two others followed with half of the Bridge of Sighs and eight feet of canvas water.