The stage is encumbered by the passage to and fro of machinists and scene-builders hastening about, running into one another in the dim, pallid light falling from above, which will give place directly, as soon as the curtain rises, to the dazzling of the foot-lights. Cardailhac is there in his dress-coat and white tie, his opera hat on one side, giving a final glance to the arrangement of the scenery, hurrying the workmen, complimenting the _ingenue_ who is waiting dressed and ready, beaming, humming an air, looking superb. To see him no one would ever guess the terrible worries which distract him. He is compromised by the fall of the Nabob--which entails the loss of his directorate--and is risking his all on the piece of this evening, obliged, if it be not a success, to leave the cost of this marvellous scenery, these stuffs at a hundred francs the yard, unpaid. It is a fourth bankruptcy that stares him in the face. But, bah! our manager is confident. Success, like all the monsters that feed on men, loves youth; and this unknown author, whose name is appearing for the first time on a theatre bill, flatters the gambler’s superstitions. Andre Maranne feels less confident. As the hour for the production of the piece approaches he loses faith in his work, terrified by the sight of the house, at which he looks through the hole in the curtain as through the narrow lens of a stereoscope. A splendid house, crammed to the roof, notwithstanding the late period of the spring and the fashionable taste for early departure to the country; a house that Cardailhac, a declared enemy of nature and the country, endeavouring always to keep Parisians in Paris till the latest possible date, has succeeded in crowding and making as brilliant as in midwinter. Fifteen hundred heads are swarming beneath the great central chandelier, erect--bent forward--turning round--questioning amid a great play of shadows and reflections; some massed in the obscure corners of the floor, others in a bright light reflected through the open doors of the boxes from the white walls of the corridor; the first-night public which is always the same, that brigand-like _tout Paris_ which goes everywhere, carrying those envied places by storm when a favour or a claim by right of some official position fails to secure them.