ble with joy and expectation.

And Olivier, who saw all, and knew all, who had sounded all the depths
of secret, helpless, and jealous love, down in the furnace of human
suffering, where the heart seems to crackle like flesh over hot coals,
stood in the back of the box looking at them with eyes that betrayed his
torture.

The three blows were struck, and suddenly the sharp little tap of a
bow on the leader's desk stopped short all movement, all coughing and
whispering; then, after a brief and profound silence, the first measure
of the introduction arose, filling the house with the invisible and
irresistible mystery of the music that penetrates our bodies, thrills
our nerves and souls with a poetic and sensuous fever, mingling with the
limpid air we breathe a wave of sound to which we listen.

Olivier took a seat at the back of the box, painfully affected, as
if his heart's wounds had been touched by those accents. But when the
curtain rose he stood up again, and saw Doctor Faust, lost in sorrowful
meditation, seated in his alchemist's laboratory.

He had already heard the opera twenty times, and almost knew it by
heart, and his attention soon wandered from the stage to the audience.
He could see only a small part of it behind the frame of the stage which
concealed their box, but the angle that was visible, extending from the
orchestra to the top gallery, showed him a portion of the audience in
which he recognized many faces. In the orchestra rows, the men in white
cravats, sitting side by side, seemed a museum of familiar countenances,
society men, artists, journalists, the whole category of those that
never fail to go where everyone else goes. In the balcony and in
the boxes he noted and named to himself the women he recognized. The
Comtesse de Lochrist, in a proscenium box, was absolutely ravishing,
while a little farther on a bride, the Marquise d'Ebelin, was already
looking through her lorgnette. "That is a pretty debut," said Bertin to
himself.

The audience listened with deep attention and evident sympathy to the
tenor Montrose, who was lamenting over his waning life.

Olivier thought: "What a farce! There is Faust, the mysterious and
sublime Faust who sings the horrible disgust and nothingness of
everything; and this crowd are asking themselves anxiously whether
Montrose's voice has not changed!" Then he listened, like the others,
and behind the trivial words of the libretto, through that music which
awake