From that moment forth the piece was saved—­nay, more, promised a great success.  This carnival of the gods, this dragging in the mud of their Olympus, this mock at a whole religion, a whole world of poetry, appeared in the light of a royal entertainment.  The fever of irreverence gained the literary first-night world:  legend was trampled underfoot; ancient images were shattered.  Jupiter’s make-up was capital.  Mars was a success.  Royalty became a farce and the army a thing of folly.  When Jupiter, grown suddenly amorous of a little laundress, began to knock off a mad cancan, Simonne, who was playing the part of the laundress, launched a kick at the master of the immortals’ nose and addressed him so drolly as “My big daddy!” that an immoderate fit of laughter shook the whole house.  While they were dancing Phoebus treated Minerva to salad bowls of negus, and Neptune sat in state among seven or eight women who regaled him with cakes.  Allusions were eagerly caught; indecent meanings were attached to them; harmless phrases were diverted from their proper significations in the light of exclamations issuing from the stalls.  For a long time past the theatrical public had not wallowed in folly more irreverent.  It rested them.

Nevertheless, the action of the piece advanced amid these fooleries.  Vulcan, as an elegant young man clad, down to his gloves, entirely in yellow and with an eyeglass stuck in his eye, was forever running after Venus, who at last made her appearance as a fishwife, a kerchief on her head and her bosom, covered with big gold trinkets, in great evidence.  Nana was so white and plump and looked so natural in a part demanding wide hips and a voluptuous mouth that she straightway won the whole house.  On her account Rose Mignon was forgotten, though she was made up as a delicious baby, with a wicker-work burlet on her head and a short muslin frock and had just sighed forth Diana’s plaints in a sweetly pretty voice.  The other one, the big wench who slapped her thighs and clucked like a hen, shed round her an odor of life, a sovereign feminine charm, with which the public grew intoxicated.  From the second act onward everything was permitted her.  She might hold herself awkwardly; she might fail to sing some note in tune; she might forget her words—­it mattered not:  she had only to turn and laugh to raise shouts of applause.  When she gave her famous kick from the hip the stalls were fired, and a glow of passion rose upward, upward, from gallery to gallery, till it reached the gods.  It was a triumph, too, when she led the dance.  She was at home in that:  hand on hip, she enthroned Venus in the gutter by the pavement side.  And the music seemed made for her plebeian voice—­shrill, piping music, with reminiscences of Saint-Cloud Fair, wheezings of clarinets and playful trills on the part of the little flutes.