Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/61

Rh Sunday. The hall was full. We say "hall;" Shakspeare for a long time had to use the yard of an inn for a theatre, and he called it "hall." Just as the curtain rose on the prologue of "Chaos Vanquished," with Ursus, Homo, and Gwynplaine on the stage, Ursus, from habit, cast a look at the audience, and experienced quite a shock.

The compartment for the nobility was occupied. A lady was sitting in the middle of the box, on the Utrecht velvet arm-chair. She was alone, and yet she filled the box. Some beings seem to emit light. This lady, like Dea, had a light within herself, but a light of an entirely different character. Dea was pale, this lady was rosy; Dea was the twilight, this lady was Aurora; Dea was beautiful, this lady was superb. Dea was innocence, candour, fairness, alabaster; this woman was of the purple, and one felt that she did not fear the blush. Her irradiation overflowed the box; she sat in the midst of it, immovable, with all the pervading majesty of an idol. Amid the sordid crowd she shone out grandly, as with the radiance of a carbuncle. She inundated it with so much light that she drowned it in shadow, and all the mean faces in it underwent eclipse. Her splendour blotted out everything else. Every eye was turned towards her. Tom-Jim-Jack was in the crowd; he was lost like the rest in the nimbus of this dazzling creature.

The lady at first so absorbed the attention of the public who had crowded to the performance that she rather diminished the opening effects of "Chaos Vanquished." Despite the air of dreamland about her, to those who were near she was a woman; perchance, too much a woman. She was tall and amply formed, and showed as much as possible of her magnificent person. She wore heavy earrings of pearls, with which were mixed those