The curtain fell amid a long-drawn salvo of applause.  Then across the twilight stage, which was no longer lit up by the footlights, there followed a disorderly retreat.  Actors and supers and chorus made haste to get back to their dressing rooms while the sceneshifters rapidly changed the scenery.  Simonne and Clarisse, however, had remained “at the top,” talking together in whispers.  On the stage, in an interval between their lines, they had just settled a little matter.  Clarisse, after viewing the thing in every light, found she preferred not to see La Faloise, who could never decide to leave her for Gaga, and so Simonne was simply to go and explain that a woman ought not to be palled up to in that fashion!  At last she agreed to undertake the mission.

Then Simonne, in her theatrical laundress’s attire but with furs over her shoulders, ran down the greasy steps of the narrow, winding stairs which led between damp walls to the porter’s lodge.  This lodge, situated between the actors’ staircase and that of the management, was shut in to right and left by large glass partitions and resembled a huge transparent lantern in which two gas jets were flaring.

There was a set of pigeonholes in the place in which were piled letters and newspapers, while on the table various bouquets lay awaiting their recipients in close proximity to neglected heaps of dirty plates and to an old pair of stays, the eyelets of which the portress was busy mending.  And in the middle of this untidy, ill-kept storeroom sat four fashionable, white-gloved society men.  They occupied as many ancient straw-bottomed chairs and, with an expression at once patient and submissive, kept sharply turning their heads in Mme Bron’s direction every time she came down from the theater overhead, for on such occasions she was the bearer of replies.  Indeed, she had but now handed a note to a young man who had hurried out to open it beneath the gaslight in the vestibule, where he had grown slightly pale on reading the classic phrase—­how often had others read it in that very place!—­“Impossible tonight, my dearie!  I’m booked!” La Faloise sat on one of these chairs at the back of the room, between the table and the stove.  He seemed bent on passing the evening there, and yet he was not quite happy.  Indeed, he kept tucking up his long legs in his endeavors to escape from a whole litter of black kittens who were gamboling wildly round them while the mother cat sat bolt upright, staring at him with yellow eyes.

“Ah, it’s you, Mademoiselle Simonne!  What can I do for you?” asked the portress.

Simonne begged her to send La Faloise out to her.  But Mme Bron was unable to comply with her wishes all at once.  Under the stairs in a sort of deep cupboard she kept a little bar, whither the supers were wont to descend for drinks between the acts, and seeing that just at that moment there were five or six tall lubbers there who, still dressed as Boule Noire masqueraders, were dying of thirst and in a great hurry, she lost her head a bit.  A gas jet was flaring in the cupboard, within which it was possible to descry a tin-covered table and some shelves garnished with half-emptied bottles.  Whenever the door of this coalhole was opened a violent whiff of alcohol mingled with the scent of stale cooking in the lodge, as well as with the penetrating scent of the flowers upon the table.