He questioned himself thus in a solitude which was emphasized by the sounds all about, the sudden turning of keys in the doors of boxes, the innumerable exclamations of an amused crowd. Then suddenly the newness of his luxurious surroundings, the odd shadows cast by the Moorish lantern on the brilliant silk covering of the couch and the hangings reminded him of the date of his arrival. Six months! Only six months since he arrived in Paris! Everything consumed and vanished in six months! He relapsed into a sort of torpor from which he was aroused by enthusiastic applause and bravos. Clearly this play of _Revolte_ was a great success. They had now reached the powerful, satirical passages; and the virulent declamation, a little emphatic in tone but relieved by a breath of youth and sincerity, made every heart beat fast after the idyllic effusions of the first act. Jansoulet determined to look and listen with the rest. After all, the theatre belonged to him. His seat in that proscenium box had cost him more than a million; surely the least he was entitled to was the privilege of occupying it. Behold him seated once more at the front of his box. In the hall a heavy, suffocating heat, stirred but not dissipated by the waving fans, their glittering spangles mingling their reflections with the impalpable outbreathings of the silence. The audience listened intently to an indignant and spirited passage against the pirates, so numerous at that period, who had become cocks of the roost after long haunting the darkest corners to rob all who passed. Certainly Maranne, when he wrote those fine lines, had had nobody less in his mind than the Nabob. But the audience saw in them an allusion to him; and while a triple salvo of applause greeted the end of the tirade, all eyes were turned toward the box on the left, with an indignant, openly insulting movement. The poor wretch, pilloried in his own theatre! A pillory that had cost him so dear! That time he did not seek to avoid the affront, but settled himself resolutely on his seat, with folded arms, and defied that crowd, which stared at him with its hundreds of upturned, sneering faces, that virtuous All-Paris which took him for a scapegoat and drove him forth after loading all its crimes upon him.