“Just look, before they put the lights out, at the human wave curling at your feet.”
I had never seen anything like it.
After the electric lights had been shut off I began to dance. The rays of light enveloped me. There was a movement in the crowd, which reverberated in echoes like the mutterings of a storm.
Exclamations followed, “Ohs” and “Ahs,” which fused into a sort of roar, comparable to the wailing of some giant animal.
You can hardly imagine anything like it. It seemed to me that on my account alone this spectacle was presented by all this moving crowd before me.
A calm ensued. The orchestra, not a very large one, seemed to me utterly ineffective in such a space. The audience, which was seated on the other side of the fountains, certainly could not hear it.
The first dance came to its close. The extinguishing of my lighting apparatus left us, the public and me, in utter darkness. The uproar of the applause became something fantastic in the dead of night. It was like the beating of a single pair of hands, but so powerful that no noise in the world could be compared with it.
I danced four times, and the different sensations expressed by the audience were most remarkable. They gave me the most vivid impression I have ever experienced. It was something immense, gigantic, prodigious.
That day I had a feeling that the crowd was really the most powerful of monarchs.
There are other monarchs as well as kings and crowds. Certain emotions are kings, too.