Knowing that some sort of rehearsal would be in progress, she garbed herself in her Pierre costume and repaired to the place which to her, of all places on earth, seemed the home of pure enchantment—the opera.
Even now, when the seats were clothed like ghosts in white sheets, when the aisles, so often adorned with living models all a-glitter with silks and jewels, and echoing with the sound of applause and laughter, were dark and still, the great hall lost none of its charm.
As she tripped noiselessly down the foyer where pillars cut from some curious stone flanked her on every side and priceless chandeliers hung like blind ghosts far above her head, she thought of the hundreds who had promenaded here displaying rich furs, costly silks and jewels. She recalled, too, the remark of that strangely studious man with a beard:
“It is a form of life.”
“I wonder what he meant?” she said half aloud. “Perhaps some day I shall meet him again. If I do, I shall ask him.”
But Jeanne was no person to be living in the past. She dreamed of the future when only dreams were at her command. For her the vivid, living, all-entrancing present was what mattered most. She had not haunted the building long before she might have been found curled up in a seat among the dark shadows close to the back row on the orchestra floor. She had pushed the white covering away, but was still half hidden by it; she could be entirely hidden in a second’s time if she so willed.
Behind and above her, black chasms of darkness, the boxes and balconies loomed. Before her the stage, all dark, seemed a mysterious cave where a hundred bandits might hide among the settings of some imposing scene.
She did not know the name of the opera to be rehearsed on this particular afternoon. Who, then, can describe the stirring of her blood, the quickening of her heart-beats, the thrill that coursed through her very being when the first faint flush of dawn began appearing upon the scene that lay before her? A stage dawn it was, to be sure; but very little less than real it was, for all that. In this matchless place of amusement shades of light, pale gray, blue, rosy red, all come creeping out, and dawn lingers as it does upon hills and forests of earth and stone and wood.
Eagerly the little French girl leaned forward to catch the first glimpse of that unknown scene. Slowly, slowly, but quite surely, to the right a building began looming out from that darkness. The trunk of a tree appeared, another and yet another. Dimly a street was outlined. One by one these objects took on a clearer line until with an impulsive movement, Jeanne fairly leaped from her place.
“It is France!” she all but cried aloud. “My own beloved France! And the opera! It is to be ‘The Juggler of Notre Dame’! Was there ever such marvelous good fortune!”