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In our country we often see an old woman bedizened like a Figurante, imagining that she shall gain the graces of youth by borrowing its garments. All this aping of youthful dress "multiplies the wrinkles of old age, and makes its decay more conspicuous."
In the first he told me that he had followed my instructions as to the Corticelli, and in the second that she would probably he paid for dancing at the carnival as first 'figurante'. I had nothing to keep me at Geneva, and Madame d'Urfe, according to our agreement, would be waiting for me at Lyons. I was therefore obliged to go there.
They dance, they converse, they sing, for exhibition, and as if they were on the stage. Their conversation, therefore, has frequently more wit than interest, and their dancing more vanity than mirth. They seem in both respects to want that happy carelessness which pleases by being pleased. A Frenchwoman is a figurante even in her chit-chat.
The poor figurante must devote years of incessant toil to her profitless task before she can shine in it. When Taglioni was preparing herself for her evening exhibition, she would, after a severe two hours' lesson from her father, fall down exhausted, and had to be undressed, sponged, and resuscitated totally unconscious.
Ah! what a foot, that little figurante has; you don't admire her, Linden?" "No, Duke; my admiration is like the bird in the cage, chained here, and cannot fly away!" answered Clarence, with a smile at the frippery of his compliment. "Ah, Monsieur," cried the pretty Frenchwoman, leaning back, "you have been at Paris, I see: one does not learn those graces of language in England.
At ten years of age I was a ballet girl at the theatre; at fourteen, my Chevalier, it was my good fortune to meet you; you initiated me, not only into the mysteries of love, but into the art of making money with far greater facility than as a figurante in the opera.
Nor were the attitudes and movements of her companion so much those of the dance as of the pantomime. There was evidently a meaning in them, though Madame de Hell could not unravel it. The young figurante frequently extended her arms and threw herself on her knees, as if in invocation of some unseen power.
As she hated the huissier, a vulgar man who thought of nothing but the good things that the Veuve Figasso could put into his stomach, and as her besotted mother starved them both in order to fulfil the huissier's demands, and as she derived no compensating joy from her dressmaking, she had found, thanks to a friend, a positron as figurante in a Marseilles Revue, and, voila there she was free, independent, and, since she had talent and application, was now earning her six francs a day.
It was the last evening, it sat there on the post and lighted the street; and it was in just such a humor as an old figurante in a ballet, who dances for the last evening, and knows that she is to be put on the shelf to-morrow.
Baletti having left us, I told her it was truly the best thing she could do, unless she preferred the sad position of waiting-maid to some grand lady. "I would not be the 'femme de chambre' even of the queen." "And 'figurante' at the opera?" "Much rather." "You are smiling?" "Yes, for it is enough to make me laugh. I the mistress of a rich nobleman, who will cover me with diamonds!
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