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In the farther wall of it was a proscenium arch and a raised stage somewhat brighter than the room itself, though the stained brick wall at the back, in the absence of any scenery, absorbed a good deal of the light. On the stage, right and left, were two irregular groups of girls, with a few men, awkwardly, Rose thought, disposed among them.
At a little distance, with only a house or two between, was a theatre in full action, the Teatro Goldoni, which is an open amphitheatre, in the ancient fashion, without any roof. We could see the upper part of the proscenium, and, had we been a little nearer, might have seen the whole performance, as did several boys who crept along the tops of the surrounding houses.
In the proscenium boxes were the wife of the Austrian Ambassador and the Duchess Gladwin; in the amphitheatre Berthe d'Osigny and Jane Tulle, the latter made famous the day before by the suicide of one of her lovers; in the boxes, Madame Berard de La Malle, her eyes lowered, her long eyelashes shading her pure cheeks; Princess Seniavine, who, looking superb, concealed under her fan panther like yawnings; Madame de Morlaine, between two young women whom she was training in the elegances of the mind; Madame Meillan, resting assured on thirty years of sovereign beauty; Madame Berthierd'Eyzelles, erect under iron-gray hair sparkling with diamonds.
A dozen pale jets of a miserable iron gas-fitting hanging out of the shadows of the roof struggled in the gloom, leaving the outlines of the Muses above the proscenium as undefinable as the silhouettes of the shopkeepers in the pit. Over against the shopkeepers was the drop-curtain, the centre of which contained a romantic picture intended to prepare the spectators for the play soon to begin.
It seemed to her that a proscenium arch of music was forming over Zoe and that her voice, a high-flung scarf of melody, was winding itself reverently round a star. That afternoon, Bruce Visigoth again asked Lilly to marry him. Taking advantage of the quiet of a Saturday afternoon half holiday, she had returned to the office to clear her desk of an accumulation of loose ends.
The Goddess of Liberty appears again this time in a beaver overcoat and pours some more incense on the obedient slave. An allegorical picture of Virtue appears in a red vest and military boots, on the left proscenium, John Brown the barber appears as Lady Macbeth, and says there is a blue tinge into his nails, and consequently he is an Octoroon.
All which pleased Aristotile, because it enriched the proscenium, and left the stage free of musicians, but he was by no means pleased that the rafters upholding the roof, which had been left without the walls below to support them, should be arranged otherwise than with a great double arch, which should be very strong; whereas Lorenzo wished that it should be sustained by some props, and by nothing else that could in any way interfere with the music.
Florence might take her for a duchess, as well as any other, but Paris, every corner of which was familiar to her, and where every scene had been, as it were, a frame for her follies, her hopes, her failures, her heartbreaks, her deceptions, all her sorrows of an ambitious woman, which had made her the daring woman that she was, those boulevards, those paths about the Lake, those proscenium boxes at the theatre, she would see them in her triumph, as she had seen them in her untrammelled follies or in the moments of her ruin and abandonment.
He pressed his own upon them in a long kiss, and left her. For more than fifty years the first proscenium box on the ground floor, to the left, at the Opera, had belonged exclusively to ten members of the jockey Club, in the name of the oldest member of which the box is taken.
The proscenium is a Greek façade, in three stories, such as never was seen in Greece; and the architecture of the three streets running back from the proscenium, and forming the one unchangeable scene of all the dramas, is like the statues in the niches and on the gallery inclosing the auditorium Greek in the most fashionable Vicentine taste.
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