waltz seemed sad and lugubrious, the whole audience stupid and foolish,
and several times he had to make an effort to keep back the tears. Of
the trouble stirred up by the hero who refused to give up the seat,
of the arrival of the Captain-General, he was scarcely conscious. He
stared toward the drop-curtain, on which was depicted a kind of
gallery with sumptuous red hangings, affording a view of a garden in
which a fountain played, yet how sad the gallery looked to him and how
melancholy the painted landscape! A thousand vague recollections surged
into his memory like distant echoes of music heard in the night, like
songs of infancy, the murmur of lonely forests and gloomy rivulets,
moonlit nights on the shore of the sea spread wide before his eyes. So
the enamored youth considered himself very wretched and stared fixedly
at the ceiling so that the tears should not fall from his eyes.

A burst of applause drew him from these meditations. The curtain
had just risen, and the merry chorus of peasants of Corneville was
presented, all dressed in cotton caps, with heavy wooden sabots on
their feet. Some six or seven girls, well-rouged on the lips and
cheeks, with large black circles around their eyes to increase their
brilliance, displayed white arms, fingers covered with diamonds,
round and shapely limbs. While they were chanting the Norman phrase
"_Allez, marchez! Allez, marchez!_" they smiled at their different
admirers in the reserved seats with such openness that Don Custodio,
after looking toward Pepay's box to assure himself that she was
not doing the same thing with some other admirer, set down in his
note-book this indecency, and to make sure of it lowered his head a
little to see if the actresses were not showing their knees.

"Oh, these Frenchwomen!" he muttered, while his imagination lost
itself in considerations somewhat more elevated, as he made comparisons