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Her zeal for these made such favor with him that he did not spare them a portrait of all those which March hoped to escape; he passed them over, scarcely able to stand, to the gardener, who was to show them the open-air theatre where Goethe used to take part in the plays. The Natur-Theater was of a classic ideal, realized in the trained vines and clipped trees which formed the coulisses.
The opera must be reached at all hazards, the coulisses must be entered; these are the abuses that must be revived. How can it be done?
A face purely French; not that noble French face we see in the Duguesclins, the Jean Barts, and among many of the old Huguenot heroes; and in modern days in a Rollin, a Hugo, an Arago, or a Pyat; but such an one as you may see any day by hundreds sneaking around the Bourse or the coulisses of the Opera, or in thousands scowling from under a shako in the ranks of a ruffian soldiery.
He muttered some confused phrases, in which ravi and flatte were alone audible, and evanished. "I know M. Lemercier by sight very well," said Enguerrand, seating himself. "One sees him very often in the Bois; and I have met him in the Coulisses and the Bal Mabille. I think, too, that he plays at the Bourse, and is lie with M. Duplessis, who bids fair to rival Louvier one of these days.
Other times they are giving a little play, usually a comedy, for life is so happy here that tragedy would not be true to it, with the characters coming and going in a grove of small pines, for the coulisses, and using a level of grass for the stage.
The orchestra played the introduction, and the curtain rose but the prima donna did not appear. The leader looked toward the coulisses, but in vain; and the audience began to express their impatience in audible murmurs. The curtain fell slowly, and the marshal of the emperor's household, coming forward, spoke a few words to Joseph, in a low voice. He turned to the king.
This, which was the political part of the drama, that which regarded the scenes played upon the public stage, had its instantaneous reflex, as we have already said in the commencement of these pages, in the salons, which were the green-rooms and coulisses. Urbanity, amenity of language, the bland demeanor hitherto characterized as la grâce Française, all these were at an end.
"That is a thing I cannot do," the baron replied, "even to please you, sweet Isabelle! If ever any insolent fellow dares to show a want of proper respect for you, I shall surely chastise him for it, as I ought, be he what he may duke, or even prince." "But remember, de Sigognac, that I am nothing but an actress, inevitably exposed to affronts from the men that haunt the coulisses.
Nevertheless, as it is counted a high privilege to be numbered among these select subscribers, changes are rare among them; besides, the members are not, as a rule, men in their first youth. They have seen, within those walls, the blooming and the renewal of several generations of pretty women; and the number of singers and dancers to whom they have paid court in the coulisses is still greater.
How many a Monsieur Thomas of our own days, whom a few years ago one had rashly fancied capable of nothing higher than coulisses and cigars, private theatricals and white kid gloves, has been not only fighting and working like a man, but meditating and writing homeward like a Christian, through the dull misery of those trenches at Sevastopol; and has found, amid the Crimean snows, that merciful fire of God, which could burn the chaff out of his heart and thaw the crust of cold frivolity into warm and earnest life.
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