During the second act I found that exceedingly chic and attractive comédienne, Mademoiselle Léa Dorville, in her loge.
Every available corner of her small room did good service. Rows of pink and Nile green silk petticoats, frous-frous and things hung from hooks under cretonned shelves.
Other hooks held mademoiselle’s stage hats, some of them as big as circus hoops. Her duchesse table was a veritable museum of little necessaries: hare’s-feet and powder puffs, mirrors, sticks of grease paint, a pot of cold cream with a silver top, a box of poudre de riz, rouge for her lips, for her nails, for the tips of her ears. It was all artificial, but it was nevertheless one real side of life. Serious gaiety if you will, since to survive the daily routine of the stage is hard work.
Being Sunday, that day they had already gone through a matinée. There is but little time to rest between the matinée and the evening performance, and in Paris the theaters are not out until midnight.
All this activity behind the scenes of the Folies Bergère seemed in strong contrast to the idle leisure of the audience in front, who during the entr’actes strolled among the demi-mondaines in the promenoir or lounged comfortably in arm-chairs pulled up to the café tables of the alcoves, and with a cooling drink listened to the band of Neapolitans.
The curtain fell upon an apotheosis representing the palace of gems; upon La Belle Otéro clothed in solitaires; upon the commère and the compère bowing to an appreciative audience; and finally upon a stageful of figurantes and coryphées who, as the final curtain fell, made a rush for their dressing-rooms. Half an hour later they all said bonsoir to the doorkeeper and scattered among the highways and byways of the city. Some who passed out wore sables; others, who half an hour before stood flashing in gems, went away in modest clothes of their own making. Some departed to meet their sweethearts, others to their families or their children; some to supper at the Café de Paris, to Pousset’s and to the Café Riche, others to little snuggeries where the cheapest dish was the most popular, and where the vieux monsieur with the purse of gold never came.
Photo by Reutlinger, Paris
LA BELLE OTÉRO
I found the stage of another big music-hall, the Olympia, differing widely from the cramped and picturesque old stage of the Folies Bergère. Here there was plenty of room and sufficient stage height for scenic spectacles. Back of all this, wide corridors led to the offices of administration and comfortable dressing-rooms. Here again I found a safe corner behind the proscenium, out of the way of changing scenery and the toes of the agile mademoiselles of the ballet.