n in the vestibule. One
of the women has been caught up by the crowd and tossed bodily into the
proscenium box, where she is caught and dragged by half a dozen brutes in
over the sill and furniture in such a manner as to disarrange as much as
possible what small vestige of raiment there is on her. The feat awakens
general enjoyment. Men and women below vent their coarse laughter at the
sorry figure she cuts and at the exposure of her person. Presently the
trick is repeated on the other side. A young woman, rather pretty and
dressed in long skirts, is thrown up, and falls back into the arms of the
crowd, who turn her over, envelop her head in her own skirts, and again
toss her up temporarily denuded. The more exactly this proceeding
outrages decency, the better it is liked. One or two repetitions of it
occurred which exceeded the limits of proper recital. The women were
bundled into the boxes, and there they were fallen upon by the crew of
half drunken ruffians, and mauled, and pulled, and exhibited in the worst
possible aspects, amid the jeers and laughter of the other drunken
wretches upon the floor. One, a heavier woman than the rest, is thrown
out of the box and falls heavily upon the floor. She is picked up
insensible by the police and carried out. There is not a whisper of
shame in the crowd. It is now drunken with liquor and its own
beastliness. It whirls in mad eddies round and round. The panting women
in the delirium of excitement; their eyes, flashing with the sudden
abnormal light of physical elation, bound and leap like tigresses; they
have lost the last sense of prudence and safety. Some of them are
unmasked, and reveal the faces of brazen and notorious she-devils, who
elsewhere are cut off by edict from this contact with the public; a few
of them are young, and would be pretty but for the lascivious glare now
lighting their faces and the smears of paint which overlay their skins;
all of them are poisonous, pitiable creatures, suffering now with the
only kind of delirium which their lives afford, rancorous, obscene,
filthy beauties, out of the gutter of civilization, gone mad with the
licence of music and the contact of men, and beset by crowds of
libidinous and unscrupulous ninnies who, anywhere else, would be ashamed
of their intimacy, or roughs to whom this kind of a ball affords the only
opportunity to exercise the few animal faculties that are left to them.

"M. Mercier stands in the middl