Little girls, all of them thin, and in short skirts, were already pirouetting, and humming airs.  Older girls stood about with their legs crossed, or, half-stooping, displayed their bosoms while retying the laces of their pink shoes.  Others, wearing a kind of Siamese headdress with ornaments of gold, were laughing and clashing together their little silver cymbals.  Awkward fellows with false beards, dressed like high priests in robes of yellow, striped with red, elbowed past and jostled against the girls quite unceremoniously.  An usher, dressed a la Francaise, and wearing a chain around his neck, paced, grave and melancholy, amongst these shameless young girls.

The greenroom at the end of the stage was entered through a large vestibule hung with curtains of grayish velvet shot with violet, and at the top of the steps where some men in dress-clothes were talking to ballet-girls, Vaudrey could see in the great salon beyond, blazing with light, groups of half-nude women surrounded by men, resembling, in their black clothes, beetles crawling about roses, the whole company reflected in a flood of light, in an immense mirror that covered one end of the room.  Little by little, Vaudrey could make out above the paintings representing ancient dances, and the portraits by Camargo or Noverre, a confusion of gaudy skirts, pink legs, white shoulders, with the ubiquitous black coats sprinkled about here and there amongst these bright colors like large blots of ink upon ball-dresses.

Sulpice had often heard the greenroom of the ballet spoken about, and he was at once completely disillusioned.  The glaring, brutal light ruthlessly exposed the worn and faded hangings; and the pretty girls in their full, short, gauzy petticoats, with their bare arms, smiling and twisting about, their satin-shod feet resting upon gray velvet footstools, seemed to him, as they occupied the slanting floor, to move in a cloud of dust, and to be robbed of all naturalness and freshness.

“And is this all?” the minister exclaimed almost involuntarily.

“What!” answered Granet, “you seem hard to please!”

Amongst all these girls, there had been manifested an expression of mingled curiosity, coquetry and banter on Vaudrey’s appearance in their midst.  His presence in the manager’s box had been noticed and his coming to the greenroom expected.  Every one had hurried thither.  Sulpice was pointed out.  He was the cynosure of all eyes.  On the divans beneath the mirror, some young, well-dressed, bald men, surrounded—­perhaps by chance—­by laughing ballet-girls, now half-concealed themselves behind the voluminous skirts of the girls about them, and bent their heads, thus rendering their baldness more visible, just as a woman buries her nose in her bouquet to avoid recognizing an acquaintance.

Vaudrey, observing this ruse, smiled a slight, sarcastic smile.  He recognized behind the shielding petticoats, some of his prefects, those from the environs of Paris, come from Versailles and Chartres, or from some sub-prefectures, and gallantly administering the affairs of France from the heart of the greenroom.  Amiable functionaries of the Ministry of Fine Arts also came here to study aestheticism between the acts.