This one
last night had grouped around the proscenium what looked exactly like a
turkey's insides (I hope you aren't shocked, Mamma!). I once saw the
marmiton taken out at Arrachon, when I was a little girl and got into
the kitchen,--just those awful colours, and strange long, twisted,
curled-up tuby-looking things. They are massed on the boxes, too, and
were, I suppose, German "Art Nouveau."
I always think Art Nouveau must have been originated by a would-be
artist who got drunk on absinthe after eating too much pate de foie
gras in a batard-Louis XV. room, then slept, then woke, and in a fit of
D.T. conceived it. He saw impossible flowers and almost rats running up
the furniture, and every leg and line out of balance and twisted; and
fancy, if one could avoid it, putting it in a theatre! The play itself
was very well acted, but, as is nearly always the case here, unless it
is a lovely blood-and-shooting, far West play, the heroine is drawn to
be a selfish puny character, full of egotism and thinking of her own
feelings. The men were perfectly splendid actors, but they distracted
my eye so with their padded shoulders it quite worried me. The hero was
a small person, and when he appeared in tennis flannels his shoulders
were sloping, and in proportion to his little body; but when the coat
got on again they were at least eight inches wider, and, as he lifted
his arms to clasp his lady, one saw where the padding ended; it was
absolutely ridiculous and made me laugh in a serious place.
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