“Is she there?” he asked, leaning over toward Bordenave.

The latter nodded affirmatively.  Before accepting the part of Geraldine, which he was offering her, Nana had been anxious to see the piece, for she hesitated to play a courtesan’s part a second time.  She, in fact, aspired to an honest woman’s part.  Accordingly she was hiding in the shadows of a corner box in company with Labordette, who was managing matters for her with Bordenave.  Fauchery glanced in her direction and then once more set himself to follow the rehearsal.

Only the front of the stage was lit up.  A flaring gas burner on a support, which was fed by a pipe from the footlights, burned in front of a reflector and cast its full brightness over the immediate foreground.  It looked like a big yellow eye glaring through the surrounding semiobscurity, where it flamed in a doubtful, melancholy way.  Cossard was holding up his manuscript against the slender stem of this arrangement.  He wanted to see more clearly, and in the flood of light his hump was sharply outlined.  As to Bordenave and Fauchery, they were already drowned in shadow.  It was only in the heart of this enormous structure, on a few square yards of stage, that a faint glow suggested the light cast by some lantern nailed up in a railway station.  It made the actors look like eccentric phantoms and set their shadows dancing after them.  The remainder of the stage was full of mist and suggested a house in process of being pulled down, a church nave in utter ruin.  It was littered with ladders, with set pieces and with scenery, of which the faded painting suggested heaped-up rubbish.  Hanging high in air, the scenes had the appearance of great ragged clouts suspended from the rafters of some vast old-clothes shop, while above these again a ray of bright sunlight fell from a window and clove the shadow round the flies with a bar of gold.

Meanwhile actors were chatting at the back of the stage while awaiting their cues.  Little by little they had raised their voices.

“Confound it, will you be silent?” howled Bordenave, raging up and down in his chair.  “I can’t hear a word.  Go outside if you want to talk; we are at work.  Barillot, if there’s any more talking I clap on fines all round!”

They were silent for a second or two.  They were sitting in a little group on a bench and some rustic chairs in the corner of a scenic garden, which was standing ready to be put in position as it would be used in the opening act the same evening.  In the middle of this group Fontan and Prulliere were listening to Rose Mignon, to whom the manager of the Folies-Dramatique Theatre had been making magnificent offers.  But a voice was heard shouting: 

“The duchess!  Saint-Firmin!  The duchess and Saint-Firmin are wanted!”

Only when the call was repeated did Prulliere remember that he was Saint-Firmin!  Rose, who was playing the Duchess Helene, was already waiting to go on with him while old Bosc slowly returned to his seat, dragging one foot after the other over the sonorous and deserted boards.  Clarisse offered him a place on the bench beside her.