The curtain goes up on a space of complete darkness (in Moscow they gave you the impression that you were looking into illimitable space), from which a figure in grey emerges (in Moscow there was a vast shadow behind him, shaped like that of Memnon’s statue)--a grey figure with shrouded head and only his mouth visible. This figure is called in Russian “He.” “He” is Fate, Life, Destiny, what you will--the _Y_ quantity which is inseparable from the _X_ quantity Man. The same thing as Alfred de Musset pictures in his _Nuit de Décembre_, the presence which was always with him “qui me resemblait comme un frère.” The grey figure speaks a prologue, the beginning of which is as follows: “Behold and listen, you who have come hither for mirth and laughter. Here you shall see pass before you the whole life of Man, with its dark beginning and its dark end. Unborn hitherto and mysteriously hid in the womb of time, without thought, without feeling, without knowledge of aught, he mysteriously breaks through the barriers of nothingness and with a cry heralds the beginning of his brief life. In the night of oblivion a candle breaks into flame lit by an unseen hand.--It is the life of Man. Look upon its flame--it is the life of Man. As soon as he is born he receives the shape and the name of Man, and becomes like unto all men who dwell upon the earth. And their merciless fate becomes his fate, and his merciless fate is the fate of all men. Irresistibly compelled by Time, he passes through the unchanging stages of human life, from the depths to the heights, from the heights to the depths. With darkened sight, he shall never perceive the next step over which his uncertain foot is already raised; with obscured knowledge he shall never know what the coming day, what the coming hour, what the coming minute are to bring. And in his blind ignorance, outworn by foreboding and convulsed by hope and fear, submissive he fulfils the iron circle of his destiny.” The prologue, of which I have only quoted a small part, is written in majestic prose, and it recalls the chorus in Swinburne’s “Atalanta in Calydon”-- “He weaves and is clothed with derision, Sows and he shall not reap. His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep.”