The curtains parted, the piano played louder. The effect was dazzling. The electric ray fell upon a flaming splendour, which the spectators at first thought was a brazier in which bars of gold and precious stones seemingly melted. A new grotto was presented, but this one was not the cool retreat of Venus, bathed by the waters which eddied on fine pearl besprinkled sand; it must have been situated in the bowels of the earth, in some deep fiery stratum, it seemed a fissure of the ancient Hades, a crevice amid a mine of liquescent metals inhabited by Plutus. The silk, simulating the rock, displayed broad metallic lodes, layers which looked like the veins of the old world, teeming with incalculable wealth and the eternal life of the soil. On the ground, by a bold anachronism, which Monsieur Hupel de la Noue had decided on, there was an avalanche of twenty-franc pieces, louis spread out, louis piled up, a pullulation of ascending louis. On the summit of this heap of gold sat Madame de Guende as Plutus, a female Plutus, a Plutus showing her bosom, amid the broad streaks of her dress imitating all the metals. Around the god, erect or reclining, united in bunches, or blooming apart, were grouped the fairy-like efflorescences of this grotto into which the caliphs of the "Arabian Nights" had seemingly emptied their treasure. There was Madame Haffner as Gold, with a stiff skirt as resplendent as the robes of a bishop; Madame d'Espanet as Silver, shining like moonlight; Madame de Lauwerens in warm blue as a Sapphire, having beside her little Madame Daste, a smiling Turquoise, of a tender shade of blue; then were spread out the Emerald, Madame de Meinhold, and the Topaz, Madame Teissière; and lower down, Countess Vanska, lending her dark ardour to Coral, was stretched out with her arms raised and loaded with red drops, similar to some monstrous and adorable polype, which displayed a woman's flesh amid the pink and pearly openings of her shell. These ladies wore necklaces, bracelets, complete sets of jewels formed of the precious stone they represented. The audience particularly noticed the original jewellery of Mesdames Haffner and d'Espanet, exclusively composed of little gold and little silver coins, fresh from the mint. In the foreground the drama remained the same: the nymph Echo tempted handsome Narcissus who again refused with a gesture. And the eyes of the spectators grew accustomed with delight to this yawning cavity opening amid the inflamed entrails of the earth, to this pile of gold on which the wealth of a world was wallowing.