A Visit to Box Five
they were deciding "to look into that little matter of Box Five."
Leaving behind them the broad staircase which leads from the lobby
outside the managers' offices to the stage and its dependencies, they
crossed the stage, went out by the subscribers' door and entered the
house through the first little passage on the left. Then they made
their way through the front rows of stalls and looked at Box Five on
the grand tier, They could not see it well, because it was half in
darkness and because great covers were flung over the red velvet of the
ledges of all the boxes.
They were almost alone in the huge, gloomy house; and a great silence
surrounded them. It was the time when most of the stage-hands go out
for a drink. The staff had left the boards for the moment, leaving a
scene half set. A few rays of light, a wan, sinister light, that
seemed to have been stolen from an expiring luminary, fell through some
opening or other upon an old tower that raised its pasteboard
battlements on the stage; everything, in this deceptive light, adopted
a fantastic shape. In the orchestra stalls, the drugget covering them
looked like an angry sea, whose glaucous waves had been suddenly
rendered stationary by a secret order from the storm phantom, who, as
everybody knows, is called Adamastor. MM. Moncharmin and Richard were
the shipwrecked mariners amid this motionless turmoil of a calico sea.
They made for the left boxes, plowing their way like sailors who leave
their ship and try to struggle to the shore. The eight great polished
columns stood up in the dusk like so many huge piles supporting the
threatening, crumbling, big-bellied cliffs whose layers were
represented by the circular, parallel, waving lines of the balconies of
the grand, first and second tiers of boxes. At the top, right on top
of the cliff, lost in M. Lenepveu's copper ceiling, figures grinned and
grimaced, laughed and jeered at MM. Richard and Moncharmin's distress.
And yet these figures were usually very serious. Their names were
Isis, Amphitrite, Hebe, Pandora, Psyche, Thetis, Pomona, Daphne,
Clytie, Galatea and Arethusa. Yes, Arethusa herself and Pandora, whom
we all know by her box, looked down upon the two new managers of the
Opera, who ended by clutching at some piece of wreckage and from there
stared silently at Box Five on the grand tier.
