Finally came the permission to reoepen the Polish theater, and indeed the caprice which was before violent against it, was now exceedingly favorable, but of course not without collateral purposes.  The scanty theater on the Krasinski place, which was alone in Warsaw, except the remote circus and the little theater of King Stanislaus Augustus, was given up, and the sum of four millions of florins ($1,600,000) devoted to the erection of two large and magnificent theaters.  The superintendence of the work of building and the management of the performances was, according to the Russian system, intrusted to one General Rautenstrauch, a man seventy years old, and worn out both in mind and body.  The two theaters were erected under one roof, and arranged on the grandest and most splendid scale.  The edifice is opposite the City Hall, occupies a whole side of the main public place, and is above 750 feet in length.  The pit in each is supported by a series of immense, stupid, square pilasters, such as architecture has seldom witnessed out of Russia.  Over these pilasters stands the first row of boxes supported by beautifully wrought Corinthian columns, and above these rise three additional rows.  The edifice is about 160 feet high and is the most colossal building in Warsaw.  As it was designed to treat the actors in military fashion and according to Russian style, the building was laid out like barracks and about seven hundred persons live in it, most of them employed about the theater.  The two stages were built by a German architect under the inspection of the General whose peremptory suggestions were frequent and injurious.  Both the great theater as it is called, which has four rows of boxes, and can contain six thousand auditors, and the Variete theater which is very much smaller, are fitted out with all sorts of apparatus that ever belonged to a stage.  In fact, new machinery has in many cases been invented for them and proved totally useless.  The Russian often hits upon queer notions when he tries to show his gifts.

On one side a very large and strong bridge has been erected leading from the street to the stage, to be used whenever the piece requires large bodies of cavalry to make their appearance, and there are machines that can convey persons with the swiftness of lightning down from the sky above the stage, a distance of 56 feet.  A machine for which a ballet has been composed surpasses everything I ever saw in its size; it serves to transport eighty persons together on a seeming cloud from the roof to the foot-lights.  I was astonished by it when I first beheld it although I had seen the machines of the grand opera at Paris:  the second time I reflected that it alone cost 40,000 florins [$16,000].

Under the management of two Russian Generals, who have hitherto been at the head of the establishment, a vast deal has in this way been accomplished for mere external show.