Place du Chateau-d'Eau consisted of one immense hall, where the place of
the pit was taken up by the circus or riding school for all sorts of
horsemanship, which circus was connected with the stage by inclined
planes, whenever a military piece with battles in it was performed. In
this circus Laurent Franconi made us practise "la haute ecole," and his
assistants. Bassin and Lagoutte, taught us to vault on horseback,
astride and sitting, and standing upright--after every fashion, in fact.
And to our great amusement, too, these lessons, falling as they did on
Sunday afternoons, generally coincided with the rehearsals on the stage,
in which we joyfully took our share during the intervals we were allowed
for rest, scaling the practicable scenery, or taking part with the
artists in certain interludes not mentioned on the programme. This was
not indeed our only initiation into theatrical art, a career bearing so
much analogy to that of every prince. Taking advantage of the close
proximity of the Palais-Royal to the Comedie-Francaise, my father had
added a regular course of dramatic literature to the educational plan he
had laid out for us. So very often when the old stock plays were being
given at the Francais, he would take us by a door leading from his
drawing-room into the passage which separates the side scenes from the
artists' green-room, and leave us in his box--the three centre ones on
the grand tier thrown together--returning to fetch us at the end of the
performance. Those evenings at the Comedie-Francaise were our greatest
joy, and taught us many a useful lesson, filling our heads with classic
literature far more efficiently than all the reading and courses of
lectures in the world. But those unlucky classics were very much
neglected. They were not a bit the fashion. There would hardly be two
hundred people in the theatre, and all the boxes were empty. A wretched
orchestra, conducted by a stout man of the name of Chodron, squeaked a
tune that set everybody's teeth on edge. Up would go the curtain,
without any warning, in the very middle of some phrase in the music