Gwynplaine, as well as Ursus, contemplated her.

The Green Box somewhat resembled a phantasmagoria in its representations.  “Chaos Vanquished” was rather a dream than a piece; it generally produced on the audience the effect of a vision.  Now, this effect was reflected on the actors.  The house took the performers by surprise, and they were thunderstruck in their turn.  It was a rebound of fascination.

The woman watched them, and they watched her.

At the distance at which they were placed, and in that luminous mist which is the half-light of a theatre, details were lost and it was like a hallucination.  Of course it was a woman, but was it not a chimera as well?  The penetration of her light into their obscurity stupefied them.  It was like the appearance of an unknown planet.  It came from a world of the happy.  Her irradiation amplified her figure.  The lady was covered with nocturnal glitterings, like a milky way.  Her precious stones were stars.  The diamond brooch was perhaps a pleiad.  The splendid beauty of her bosom seemed supernatural.  They felt, as they looked upon the star-like creature, the momentary but thrilling approach of the regions of felicity.  It was out of the heights of a Paradise that she leant towards their mean-looking Green Box, and revealed to the gaze of its wretched audience her expression of inexorable serenity.  As she satisfied her unbounded curiosity, she fed at the same time the curiosity of the public.

It was the Zenith permitting the Abyss to look at it.

Ursus, Gwynplaine, Vinos, Fibi, the crowd, every one had succumbed to her dazzling beauty, except Dea, ignorant in her darkness.

An apparition was indeed before them; but none of the ideas usually evoked by the word were realized in the lady’s appearance.

There was nothing about her diaphanous, nothing undecided, nothing floating, no mist.  She was an apparition; rose-coloured and fresh, and full of health.  Yet, under the optical condition in which Ursus and Gwynplaine were placed, she looked like a vision.  There are fleshy phantoms, called vampires.  Such a queen as she, though a spirit to the crowd, consumes twelve hundred thousand a year, to keep her health.

Behind the lady, in the shadow, her page was to be perceived, el mozo, a little child-like man, fair and pretty, with a serious face.  A very young and very grave servant was the fashion at that period.  This page was dressed from top to toe in scarlet velvet, and had on his skull-cap, which was embroidered with gold, a bunch of curled feathers.  This was the sign of a high class of service, and indicated attendance on a very great lady.

The lackey is part of the lord, and it was impossible not to remark, in the shadow of his mistress, the train-bearing page.  Memory often takes notes unconsciously; and, without Gwynplaine’s suspecting it, the round cheeks, the serious mien, the embroidered and plumed cap of the lady’s page left some trace on his mind.  The page, however, did nothing to call attention to himself.  To do so is to be wanting in respect.  He held himself aloof and passive at the back of the box, retiring as far as the closed door permitted.