was furnished
with two chairs, a mirror and a small table containing a drawer which
had been blackened by the grease from brushes and combs. A great
perspiring fellow with smoking shoulders was changing his linen there,
while in a similar room next door a woman was drawing on her gloves
preparatory to departure. Her hair was damp and out of curl, as though
she had just had a bath. But Fauchery began calling the count, and the
latter was rushing up without delay when a furious "damn!" burst from
the corridor on the right. Mathilde, a little drab of a miss, had just
broken her washhand basin, the soapy water from which was flowing out to
the stairhead. A dressing room door banged noisily. Two women in their
stays skipped across the passage, and another, with the hem of her shift
in her mouth, appeared and immediately vanished from view. Then followed
a sound of laughter, a dispute, the snatch of a song which was suddenly
broken off short. All along the passage naked gleams, sudden visions
of white skin and wan underlinen were observable through chinks in
doorways. Two girls were making very merry, showing each other their
birthmarks. One of them, a very young girl, almost a child, had drawn
her skirts up over her knees in order to sew up a rent in her drawers,
and the dressers, catching sight of the two men, drew some curtains half
to for decency's sake. The wild stampede which follows the end of a
play had already begun, the grand removal of white paint and rouge, the
reassumption amid clouds of rice powder of ordinary attire. The strange
animal scent came in whiffs of redoubled intensity through the lines
of banging doors. On the third story Muffat abandoned himself to the
feeling of intoxication which was overpowering him. For the chorus
girls' dressing room was there, and you saw a crowd of twenty women
and a wild display of soaps and flasks of lavender water. The place
resembled the common room in a slum lodging house. As he passed by he
heard fierce sounds of washing behind a closed door and a perfect storm
raging in a washhand basin. And as he was mounting up to the topmost
story of all, curiosity led him to risk one more little peep through
an open loophole. The room was empty, and under the flare of the gas a
solitary chamber pot stood forgotten among a heap of petticoats trailing
on the floor. This room afforded him his ultimate impression. Upstairs
on the fourth floor he was well-nigh suffocated. All the scents,