A few rays of light, a wan, sinister light,
that seemed to have been stolen from an expiring luminary,
fell through some opening or other upon an old tower that raised
its pasteboard battlements on the stage; everything, in this
deceptive light, adopted a fantastic shape. In the orchestra stalls,
the drugget covering them looked like an angry sea, whose glaucous
waves had been suddenly rendered stationary by a secret order
from the storm phantom, who, as everybody knows, is called Adamastor.
MM. Moncharmin and Richard were the shipwrecked mariners
amid this motionless turmoil of a calico sea. They made
for the left boxes, plowing their way like sailors who leave their
ship and try to struggle to the shore. The eight great polished
columns stood up in the dusk like so many huge piles supporting
the threatening, crumbling, big-bellied cliffs whose layers were
represented by the circular, parallel, waving lines of the balconies
of the grand, first and second tiers of boxes. At the top,
right on top of the cliff, lost in M. Lenepveu's copper ceiling,
figures grinned and grimaced, laughed and jeered at MM. Richard and
Moncharmin's distress.
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