count at the foot of the stairs and without
effort let slip only these simple words:

"The right-hand passage on the second floor. The door's not shut."

Muffat was alone in that silent corner of the house. As he passed before
the players' waiting room, he had peeped through the open doors and
noticed the utter dilapidation of the vast chamber, which looked
shamefully stained and worn in broad daylight. But what surprised him
most as he emerged from the darkness and confusion of the stage was
the pure, clear light and deep quiet at present pervading the lofty
staircase, which one evening when he had seen it before had been bathed
in gas fumes and loud with the footsteps of women scampering over
the different floors. He felt that the dressing rooms were empty,
the corridors deserted; not a soul was there; not a sound broke the
stillness, while through the square windows on the level of the stairs
the pale November sunlight filtered and cast yellow patches of light,
full of dancing dust, amid the dead, peaceful air which seemed to
descend from the regions above.

He was glad of this calm and the silence, and he went slowly up, trying
to regain breath as he went, for his heart was thumping, and he was
afraid lest he might behave childishly and give way to sighs and tears.
Accordingly on the first-floor landing he leaned up against a wall--for
he was sure of not being observed--and pressed his handkerchief to his
mouth and gazed at the warped steps, the iron balustrade bright with the
friction of many hands, the scraped paint on the walls--all the squalor,
in fact, which that house of tolerance so crudely displayed at the pale
afternoon hour when courtesans are asleep. When he reached the second
floor he had to step over a big yellow cat which was lying curled up on
a step. With half-closed eyes this cat was keeping solitary watch over
the house, where the close and now frozen odors which the women nightly
left behind them had rendered him somnolent.

In the right-hand corridor the door of the dressing room had, indeed,
not been closed entirely. Nana was waiting. That little Mathilde, a drab
of a young girl, kept her dressing room in a filthy state. Chipped jugs
stood about anyhow; the dressing table was greasy, and there was a chair
covered with red stains, which looked as if someone had bled over the
straw. The paper pasted on walls and ceiling was splashed from top to
bottom with spots of soapy water and this smelled