A Porter. (Pushing a little cart loaded with baggage.) Monsieur, here is your baggage. Do you wish to have it checked?
Perrichon. Certainly! But first, I am going to count them ... because, when one knows the number ... One, two, three, four, five, six, my wife, seven, my daughter, eight, and for myself, nine. We are nine.
Porter. Put it up there!
Perrichon. (Hurrying toward the back.) Hurry!
Porter. Not that way, this way! (He points to the left.)
Perrichon. All right! (To the women.) Wait for me there! We mustn’t get lost!
(He goes out running, following the porter.)[14]
The first scene undoubtedly helps to create the atmosphere of a large railway station, but everything in it could be brought out in what is now Scene 2. Even the way in which Majorin is passed from one employee to the other could be transferred to Perrichon. Every fact in Majorin’s soliloquy is either repeated in the scenes which follow, or could easily be brought out in them.
What has made necessary this swifter preliminary exposition is, probably, the growing popularity of three or four acts as compared with five. Less space has forced a swifter movement. Contrast, in the five-act piece Une Chaine[15] by Scribe, the slow exposition in a first act of thirty-two pages with the perfectly adequate re-statement in six and a half pages in the one-act adaptation by Sidney Grundy, In Honour Bound.[16]