The troupe consists of forty persons. It is a little difficult to realize the size of the establishment required to work these large show-theatres. A booth like that of Adrian Delille can seat 1,200 people, and it is always crowded for the Sunday performances. They cost an average of 400 francs [p100] per diem, for the principal performers receive high salaries. Clowns, acrobats, buffoons, and equilibrists, all these artists—and they are the same who appear in the hippodrome and circuses—are engaged through the agencies. The engagements are concluded for one month, but they can be cancelled at the end of a week at the wish of the proprietor.
A good clown, a skilful gymnast, can earn in a forain theatre like that of Delille as much as at the circus—about 2,000 francs per month.
The dancers employed to pose in the tableaux vivants are paid according to their beauty and skill—180, 240, or even 500 francs per month.
Delille paid a still higher sum to the two pretty girls who lately posed for him as the two little combatants in Emile Bayard’s picture An Affair of Honour.
It would be quite as indiscreet to ask a conjurer to explain his tricks, as a pretty woman to tell you what scent she uses for her toilet, and therefore I have never discussed the subject. The exclusive ownership of a conjuring trick is difficult to defend in law, and for this reason prestidigitators are always on their guard against the indiscretion of their workpeople. They have been betrayed a hundred times for a bottle of wine and a few banknotes, and now, taught by misfortune, they surround their experiments with as much mystery as the old Egyptian priests used in their worship of the veiled Isis. After all, our pleasure lies in this mystery only. “These phantasmagorias,” it has been well said by one of our contemporaries, whom a taste for philosophic acrobatics has led to esteem acrobats in [p101] fleshings,—“these phantasmagorias please us like every other phenomena which seems to contradict the universal order of things, to counteract the laws of nature. The universe being what it is, we have no other consolation than the dream that it is otherwise, and this is the true essence of poetry. Conjuring is lyrical poetry—fable in action.”[5]
[p102]
The time has passed when conjurers were forced to ascend a woodpile and worthy folk clung to the honour of bringing a faggot to roast them with. Every one knows that there is nothing supernatural in the illusions they create. Usually the explanation is one of the most simple things in the world, but our search for it is nearly always unsuccessful, yet whilst we persevere in it we cannot be bored, and this is really the only aim in view.