“You see beasts, do you not, animals that swarm round you?”
They all reply in the affirmative, hanging down their heads.
These drunken hallucinations, these apparitions of animals, are the framework of the English pantomime, the terrible visions of a gin-drinker who has rolled into a gutter at the door of a drinking bar.
The Craggs, “gentlemen acrobats,” also appeared at the Folies-Bergères.
They came from New York, where they had made a great success. They had also made large profits during their six [p302] weeks’ engagement, for they received 100 dollars a night. They enter the stage in Indian file, all the seven, wearing evening dress and white ties. They come forward in a line to the front of the stage, and bend their heads; you think that they are going to bow, simply like you or I. Instead they make a somersault. Seven somersaults forward. They are so quickly executed that every one present asks if he is dreaming. Very correctly executed, notwithstanding, very correctly! Not one smooth head is ruffled, not one white tie unloosed, not a shirt front creased.
We must however believe that the coat inconveniences the gentlemen in their work, for with very leisurely movements, [p303] and perfect indifference, the seven Craggs go to the back of the stage, and there, one, two, three, in time, as though performing an exercise, they take off their coats and appear in fourteen shirt sleeves.
And from that moment, for the space of half an hour, they execute the most wonderful acrobatic feats.