The interior of the theater presented a lively aspect. It was filled
from top to bottom, with people standing in the corridors and in
the aisles, fighting to withdraw a head from some hole where they
had inserted it, or to shove an eye between a collar and an ear. The
open boxes, occupied for the most part by ladies, looked like baskets
of flowers, whose petals--the fans--shook in a light breeze, wherein
hummed a thousand bees. However, just as there are flowers of strong
or delicate fragrance, flowers that kill and flowers that console,
so from our baskets were exhaled like emanations: there were to be
heard dialogues, conversations, remarks that bit and stung. Three
or four boxes, however, were still vacant, in spite of the lateness
of the hour. The performance had been advertised for half-past eight
and it was already a quarter to nine, but the curtain did not go up,
as his Excellency had not yet arrived. The gallery-gods, impatient
and uncomfortable in their seats, started a racket, clapping their
hands and pounding the floor with their canes.

"Boom--boom--boom! Ring up the curtain! Boom--boom--boom!"

The artillerymen were not the least noisy. Emulators of Mars, as
Ben-Zayb called them, they were not satisfied with this music; thinking
themselves perhaps at a bullfight, they made remarks at the ladies who
passed before them in words that are euphemistically called flowers
in Madrid, although at times they seem more like foul weeds. Without
heeding the furious looks of the husbands, they bandied from one to
another the sentiments and longings inspired by so many beauties.

In the reserved seats, where the ladies seemed to be afraid to venture,