I am sorry to say that the handling of a small part of this crowd by the railway people, and of the whole of it by the local management, was deplorably bad. The trains were inadequate and irregular; the great mistake was made of opening only three of the many entrances to the theatre; and the artistic error was committed (against the protest of M. Mounet-Sully, who earnestly desired to maintain the traditions of the Greek theatre by reserving the orchestra for the evolutions of the chorus) of filling the orchestra with chairs: with the result that these so-called first-class seats—being all on the same level, and that level four feet lower than the stage—were at once the highest-priced and the worst seats in the building. Decidedly the best seats, both for seeing and hearing, were those of the so-called second class—the newly erected tiers of stone. But so excellent are the acoustic properties of the theatre, even now when the stage is roofless, that in the highest tier of the third-class seats (temporary wooden benches filling the space not yet rebuilt in stone in the upper third of the auditorium) all the well-trained and well-managed voices could be clearly heard.
Naturally, the third-class seats were the most in demand; and from the moment that the gates were opened the way to them was thronged: an acute ascent—partly rough stairway, partly abrupt incline—which zigzagged up the hill between the wall of the theatre and the wall of an adjacent house and which was lighted, just below its sharpest turn, by a single lamp pendant from an outjutting gibbet of iron. By a lucky mischance, three of the incompetent officials on duty at the first-class entrance—whereat, in default of guiding signs, we happened first to apply ourselves—examined in turn our tickets and assured us that the way to our second-class places was up that stairway-path. But we heartily forgave, and even blessed, the stupidity of those officials, because it put us in the way of seeing quite the most picturesque bit that we saw that night outside of the theatre's walls: the strong current of eager humanity, all vague and confused and sombre, pressing upward through the shadows, showing for a single moment—the hurrying mass resolved into individual hurrying figures—as it passed beneath the hanging lamp, and in the same breath swept around the projecting corner and lost to view. It looked, at the very least, treasons, conspiracies, and mutinous outbursts—that shadowy multitude surging up that narrow and steep and desperately crooked dusky footway. I felt that just around the lighted turn, where the impetuous forms appeared clearly in the moment of their disappearance, surely must be the royal palace they were bent upon sacking; and it was with a sigh of unsatisfied longing that I turned away (when we got at last the right direction) before word came to me that over the swords of his dying guardsmen they had pressed in and slain the king!
The soldiers on guard at the ascent, and thickly posted on the hill-side above the highest tiers, gave colour to my fancy. And, actually, it was as guards against assassins that the soldiers were there. Only a little more than two months had passed since the slaying of President Carnot at Lyons; and the cautionary measures taken to assure the safety of the three ministers at Orange were all the more rigid because one of them was the minister of justice—of all the government functionaries the most feared and hated by anarchists, because he is most intimately associated with those too rare occasions when anarchist heads are sliced off in poor payment for anarchist crimes. This undercurrent of real tragedy—with its possibility of a crash, followed by a cloud of smoke rising slowly above the wreck of the gaily decorated ministerial box—drew out with a fine intensity the tragedy of the stage: and brought into a curious psychological coalescence the barbarisms of the dawn and of the noontime of our human world.
VI
We came again to the front of the theatre: to an entrance—approached between converging railings, which brought the crowd to an angry focus, and so passed its parts singly between the ticket-takers—leading into what once was the postscenium, and thence across where once was the "court" side of the stage to the tiers of stone seats.
However aggravating was this entrance-effect in the matter of composition, its dramatically graded light-and-shade was masterly. From the outer obscurity, shot forward as from a catapult by the pushing crowd, we were projected through a narrow portal into a dimly lighted passage more or less obstructed by fallen blocks of stone; and thence onward, suddenly, into the vast interior glaring with electric lamps: and in the abrupt culmination of light there flashed up before us the whole of the auditorium—a mountain-side of faces rising tier on tier; a vibrant throng of humanity which seemed to go on and on forever upward, and to be lost at last in the star-depths of the clear dark sky.