The passages of the interior are of the same character--spacious and substantial; but the door of the _salle_ opens, and the stranger, at a single step, enters from those murky passages into all the magic of a crowded theatre. The French have, within these few years, borrowed from us the art of lighting theatres. I recollect the French theatre lighted only by a few lamps scattered round the house, or a chandelier in the middle, which might have figured in the crypt of a cathedral. This they excused, as giving greater effect to the stage; but it threw the audience into utter gloom. They have now made the audience a part of the picture, and an indispensable part. The opera-house now shows the audience; and if not very dressy, or rather as dowdy, odd, and dishevelled a crowd as I ever recollect to have seen within theatrical walls, yet they are evidently human beings, which is much more picturesque than masses of spectres, seen only by an occasional flash from the stage. The French architects certainly have not made this national edifice grand; but they have made it a much better thing,--lively, showy, and rich. Neither majestic and monotonous, nor grand and Gothic, they have made it _riant_ and racy, like a place where men and women come to be happy, where beautiful dancers are to be seen, and where sweet songs are to be heard, and where the mind is for three or four hours to forget all its cares, and to carry away pleasant recollections for the time being. From pit to ceiling it is covered with paintings--all sorts of cupids, nymphs, and flower-garlands, and Greek urns--none of them wonders of the pencil, but all exhibiting that showy mediocrity of which every Frenchman is capable, and with which every Frenchman is in raptures. All looks rich, warm, and _operatic_. One characteristic change has struck me everywhere in Paris--the men dress better, and the women worse. When I was last here, the men dressed half bandit and half Hottentot. The revolutionary mystery was at work, and the hatred of the Bourbons was emblematised in a conical hat, a loose neckcloth, tremendous trousers, and the scowl of a stage conspirator. The Parisian men have since learned the decencies of _dress_. As I entered the house before the rising of the curtain, I had leisure to look about me, and I found even in the audience a strong contrast to those of London. By that kind of contradiction to everything rational and English which governs the Parisian, the women seem to choose _dishabille_ for the Opera.