Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 11, 2025
"I will gratify your highness. I myself would like to hear the opera without participating in it. Ladies and gentlemen of the coulisses, be so kind as to return! Gentlemen of the orchestra, resume your instruments! Gassman, have the goodness to lead. Do your best. Let us have your highest interpretation of art for you have an audience such as you may never have again.
Here were enacted so many deep tragedies, so many stately dramas, and even so many farces, which have been familiar to me so long that I have got to imagine myself invested with a kind of property in the place, and look at it as if it were merely the theatre with the coulisses, machinery, drapery, etc., for representing scenes which have long since vanished, and which no more enter the minds of the men and women who are actually moving across its pavements than if they had occurred in the moon.
The title is an ambitious one, for the salons of Paris are Paris itself; and, from the days of the Fronde and of the Hôtel Rambouillet down to our own, you may judge pretty accurately of what is going on upon the great political stage of France by what is observable in those green-rooms and coulisses called the Parisian drawing-rooms, and where, more or less, the actors of all parties may be seen, either rehearsing their parts before the performance, or seeking, after the performance is over, the several private echoes of the general public sentiment that has burst forth before the light of the foot-lamps.
During the play, de Sigognac, hidden in the coulisses, had enjoyed intensely Isabelle's charming rendering of her part, though he was more than a little jealous of the favour she apparently bestowed upon Leander and especially at the tender tone of her voice whenever she spoke to him not being yet accustomed to the feigned love-making on the stage, which often covers profound antipathies and real enmity.
My companions, who have known me from babyhood, look upon me as a sister or daughter, and treat me with invariable affection and respect; and as for the men of the outside world who haunt the coulisses, and seem to think that an actress is public property, off the stage as well as upon it, I have thus far managed to keep them at a distance continuing in real life my role of modest, ingenuous, young girl, without hypocrisy or false pretensions."
We have to allow, you will admit, at least as much to the beneficent heightening of travesty, if we have ever seen the living actor in the morning, not yet shaved, standing at the bar, his hat on one side, his mouth spreading in that abandonment to laughter which has become from the necessity of his profession, a natural trick; oh, much more, I think, than if we merely come upon an always decorative, never an obtrusive, costumed figure, leaning against the wall, nonchalantly enough, in a corner of the coulisses.
Nothing in the world would have induced me to dishonour the illustrious blood that flows in my veins. The disgraceful license of the coulisses, and the loathsome gallantries lavished upon all actresses, even those who are not comely, disgusted me from the first, and I have lived in the theatre almost as if in a convent.
He had not limited his European life, however, within the precinct of his Hanseatic consulship, but had dispersed himself very promiscuously over the Continent, and had seen many cities, and the manners of many men and of some women, singing-women, I mean, in their public character; for the Consul, correct of life as of ear, never sought to undeify his divinities by pursuing them from the heaven of the stage to the purgatorial intermediacy of the coulisses, still less to the lower depth of disenchantment into which too many of them sunk in their private life.
I am eternally hanging round dans les coulisses, I am never in the play. I instinctively thought of Captain Simpson, who had left his brother in the trenches at Saint-Quentin, and still had in him the kindly sympathy that had helped me so much.
Battles there are, behind the Alps, on what we may call the STAGE itself of this Italian War-theatre; but the grand steady battle is that of France and Don Philip, struggling spasmodically, year after year, to get a road through the COULISSES or side-scenes, namely, those Savoy Passes.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking