theatrical pit or gallery, on a night of unusual
excitement, are filled with growls, screams,
and execrations. To the French the
production of a new and successful piece is a
matter of national importance; but you may
take your chance during the hey-day of a
fresh success, and the throng of which you
form a part occasions no more personal
inconvenience than the scanty audience of a
theatre in an English watering-place.

Those very lines of human beings which
strike the spectator, when he stands—as we
have directed—near the Café du Géant, are,
of themselves, a result of order. Were a
body of London amateurs similarly
circumstanced, every one of those lines would be
transformed into a compact semicircle, every
human particle in the periphery of which
would be under the influence of a tremendous
centripetal force—the centre being the door
of the house. But the French are rigid in
their preservation of a line, not above two
deep; and, as each fresh couple arrives, it
is content to take its place behind its
predecessors. When the door at length opens,
there is no rush, from a large surface to a
single point (as when a liquid runs through
a funnel) but a procession not broader than
the entrance itself. This procession moves
into the edifice in as quiet and orderly a
manner as a well-behaved school going to
its proper place in a church.

It is true that the French—with that love
for barricades which has continued since 1588,
when the good people of Paris made such a
strong demonstration in favour of the Duke
of Guise—have invented a system which tends
to the material diminution of a theatrical
crush. Such a system is carried to perfection
at the Porte Saint Martin, where a throng is
not only forced into a line, but is obliged
to go to the very bottom of a dark alley, and
then to turn back in its maintenance of the
proper order of succession. Such a system
has also been employed at our Italian Opera;
and I need not remind my readers of the
zig-zag path enclosed on each side by a deal
fence, which used to squeeze the crowd of
Jenny Lind's admirers to a proper degree of
tenuity. But it should be borne in mind
that those barricades did not begin until the
audience had entered the outer doors of the
theatre; whereas these lines on the broad
footpath of the Boulevard are external to the
edifice, are not influenced by any material force
whatever, and merely anticipate the barricades
that will be found within. There is nothing
violent in the supposition that the same spirit
which produced the wooden barricades here,
produces that feeling for order, which almost
renders barricades superfluous.

The Parisian cold, to which I alluded
a little while ago, was not introduced as a
mere digression— as a mere piece of subjective
impertinence intruding upon an objective
description. If anything could have induced
the individuals who formed the lines on the
Boulevard du Temple to abandon their
traditional position, it would have been the
cutting wind which attacked the noses and
fingers of them all. A slight crush would,
under the circumstances, have been rather a
comfort than otherwise. But no! There
stood the gallant Frenchman, patiently
enduring the nipping of the chilliest breeze,
his only solace being an occasional gasp, and
that dull clapping of the hands which is
fondly intended to promote warmth. The
combined winds that scattered the fleet of
Æneas, would not have moved him to destroy
the due proportion of the queue of which he
formed an integral joint.

When you have entered the theatre—for I
assume you will cross the way and form part
of the procession—you will not, if you mean
to continue your observations of the peuple,
select the most fashionable part of the house.
Persons who occupy private boxes, balconies,
dress-circles, grand tiers, and other
receptacles of mere rank and fashion, are just
the same all the world over. Sit in the
humblest region save one—in what would be
the two-shilling gallery of the Haymarket
Theatre. You will be struck by the grim
assembly of men in blouses, both in your own
gallery and the one (socially below,
physically) above you; and, if you are more than
ordinarily reflective, you will perhaps observe
a look of haggard dissipation, that differs
widely from the jolly aspect of our British
amateurs. That obtuse, honest, unsophisticated
vulgarity, which is met at every step in
our London streets, is not common in Paris.
The appearance of internal refinement seems
more in disproportion to the external
attire; nearly every man looks a connoisseur,
able to appreciate the most conventional
luxuries of art. The fairy who should make
the occupier of an eightpenny (seventy-five
centimes) gallery in the Boulevard du Temple
throw off his blouse, and become— not a
harlequin, but—a marquis of the days of Louis
the Fifteenth, would not effect a very
miraculous change after all.

These same men in blouses can be as saucy
as you please, when nothing is doing on the
stage. They can crack rude jokes on your
attire as you pursue your way to a vacant
seat; they can perform all sorts of
incongruities between the acts. At the Théâtre
Lyrique I saw a very well-dressed youth
keep the audience in his vicinity in a state of
uneasiness, by deliberately sitting on the edge
of the gallery, in such a position that the
slightest touch must have hurled him down
to inevitable destruction; now talking with
unseeming loudness; now, by proffers of
barley-sugar, tempting the youth who sat
next to him to open his mouth, and then
disappointing him, by substituting a not over
clean finger; indeed, altogether getting up a
sort of spectacle on his own account during
the intervals of the performance. No sooner,
however, did the curtain rise, than he passed