The court, regarding her attentive but impassive, is dismissed with a gesture, and the great chamber is cleared of all save Thamar and her women, by whom she is now unrobed. As the festal garments drop from her, the Queen’s exhaustion, physical and mental, seems to verge upon collapse. Slowly she gains the head of her couch, as the arras is drawn from before the window. Night has fled and the purple rays of the dawn pour into the room. The Queen steps into the midst of this luminous flood, drinking deep of the morning glory. Her senses revive, she imbibes new vigour, the black shadows are lifted from her. As presently she lays herself upon the couch, her women sink to rest upon their cushions. Thus from supreme climax the action of the ballet subsides gradually to statuesque immobility once more. Stillness broods over the quiet figures of Thamar and her women. Realisation comes suddenly to the spectator that the scene is now identical with that which the lifting curtain first disclosed. And at that moment of quick apprehension--a woman stirs! In a flash of inspiration the spectator’s eye, outrunning the action on the stage, foresees the inevitable happening. Is not the whole ghastly round yet fresh and vivid in his mind? The woman looks again, whispers to another. A third bends to the Queen’s ear, and as the curtain slowly descends the treacherous scarf is being once more lightly tossed into the air. [Illustration] LE CARNAVAL. PANTOMIME-BALLET BY MICHEL FOKINE. MUSIC BY ROBERT SCHUMANN, ORCHESTRATED BY RIMSKY-KORSAKOV, LIADOV, GLAZOUNOV AND TCHEREPNIN. SCENERY AND COSTUMES DESIGNED BY LÉON BAKST. “Le Carnaval,” which has been built upon Schumann’s well-known music, is a ballet of the type which defies pedestrian description. If one may term “incident” so trifling an affair as, let us say, a butterfly’s flirtation with a flower, then “Le Carnaval” is full of incident. But it has no story, no dramatic development of a plot, to give a theme for narrative. The very characters bear relation to each other only as the _personæ_ of a carnival. The characters, indeed, are scarcely to be regarded as actual men and women. Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot and the rest who flit across the scene, are no mere impersonations of those traditional figures of fancy by gay revellers at a _bal masqué_, but themselves--living embodiments of different phases of irresponsible humanity. The spectator is conscious of an atmosphere of unreality, a sense almost of illusion. On the wings of fancy he is transported far from the realm of adamantine fact, and in a region of pure sentiment sees materialised the whole idea of Carnival.