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The theatre was crowded; the pit was a surging sea, the gallery was filled to suffocation, and in the boxes of the first and second tiers the aristocratic, elegant, educated, and learned world of all Berlin seemed to have met.
It had been the intention of the court to give but one levee that to the deputies on the Saturday preceding the opening of the States-General, but so widespread and so profound had been the dissatisfaction among the tiers at the treatment they had received on that occasion at the hands of Monsieur de Brézé, that the King had hastily decided to hold another levee on the evening of the 5th of May, to which all the deputies were again invited and at which much of the formal and displeasing ceremony of the first reception was to be banished.
These house boats, some of which have a single bamboo circular roof, others two roofs of different heights, and which include several thousand of the marvelous "slipper boats," lie in tiers along the river sides, and packed closely stem and stern along the canals, forming bustling and picturesque water streets.
They are, perhaps, a foot square, as seen when closed. Near the top of the room they are much smaller. A movable metal step-ladder stands ready for the convenience of those who wish to reach the boxes on the upper tiers. The space in the middle of the room is railed off, and there sits a guard day and night. "This is ours," said the colonel, advancing toward one of the larger drawers.
The great west window is, below the springing of its arch, separated into eight lights, which are divided into two tiers by a transom or horizontal mullion.
It was built on an artificial island made of large blocks of stone. The walls were of dark brick, and designed for three tiers of guns. The whole structure, as it rose abruptly out of the water, had a gloomy, prison-like appearance.
Then somehow through, criss-crossed currents in the crowd, they reached the mysterious door of the box, and Norma saw for the first time the great, dimly lighted circle of the opera house, the enormous rise of balcony above balcony, the double tiers of boxes, and the rows of seats downstairs, separated by wide aisles, and rapidly filling now with the men and women who were coming down to their places almost on a run.
The Bastille was taken by the people, July 14, 1789, and the National Assembly decreed its demolition.... The massive circular pedestal upon which the Colonne de Juillet now rests was intended by Napoleon I. to support a gigantic fountain in the form of an elephant, instead of the column which, after the destruction of the Bastille, the "tiers etat" of Paris had asked to erect "a Louis XVI., restaurateur de la liberte publique."
They streamed out into the streets, and sauntered along under the lights to the moving pictures, or on hot summer nights they perched like tiers of birds on the steps, and the world and youth seemed sweet to them. In Kate's dining-room, finished in black wood and red paper, they made Welsh rarebits and fudge, and in Kate's spotless kitchen odours of toast and coffee rose at unseemly hours.
"And," added Anthony, bowing towards the tiers rich with the beauty of the court "and the count himself assureth me that the blaze of yonder eyes blinded his goodly steed." Having delivered himself of this gallant conceit, so much in accordance with the taste of the day, the Englishman, approaching the king's balcony, craved permission to finish the encounter with the axe or brand.
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