Daily Mail (London), 25th January, 1898.
Red Tape by the Yard
The Terrible Ordeal of Seeing the Play in France.
Our exceedingly lively, Jew-baiting neighboars across the Channel have, as all the world knows, a passion for red tape so strong that to curtail a yard of it would cause every pale student in the Latin Quarter to riot his little soul to death. But there is tape and tape. We English love large red tape - the tape that ties up kingdoms and colonies, mighty interests and great industries, while the Frenchman, or more properly the Parisian, centres his undying affection upon tape that to our slightly stronger and steadier eyesight looks remarkably like red string. The Parisian can let his monarchy, his church, his social system go scattered to the four quarter of the earth; but when it comes to the smaller - even to the petty institution of daily civilised life - he winds each of these about with so many yards of circumlocutory twine that the least the visiting foreigner can do is to stand lost in astonishment and admiration.
Take the humble, ordinary, everyday omnibus. You have got to travel first to a bureau, introduce yourself to the buraliste, cajole him into giving you a numbered ticket, and then wait until it is the controleur's pleasure to announce your number to the conductor of the fourth or fifth omnibus which has passed. The controleur allows you to ascend, which you, having bowed to the buraliste, proceed to do. That is by no means the end of the matter, as every visitor knows, but it will serve to preface a slight consideration of another weighty mass of red tape, videlicet, the machinery of a French theatre.
To begin with, there is the buraliste. The buraliste is engaged by the management ostensibly to sell tickets for seats. He does not really do so. As he is only on view three hours a day, you will, however, probably not make his acquaintance. Besides, there are three of him (or her). The first sells tickets from 12fr. 50c. upwards, and is usally an elderly gentleman, formerly a frappeur or scene-shifter who has had the misfortune to injure his arm or leg, or a prompter who has become deaf. His is an easy job; because at the majority of the Paris theatres the orchestra stalls are "papered" with free tickets. The second buraliste is oftenest a lady, who deals in boxes, baignoires and balconies; while the third, a dapper young man, presides over the cheaper part of the vente des sieges. The best plan is to ignore the bureaucracy altogether, and go to the agence for your mandat, for a mandat is all you will get to begin with.
The idea of buying a ticket for a seat outright would startle a Parisian manager out of his wits. He would as soon think of hailing a passing omnibus or of flying to the moon. One can hear him saying:- "Those terrible English - will it be believed they are so base, so lost to the finer feelings of man, that they actually buy and sell bald and naked tickets to the play, without first clothing them in a mandat! Quel betise! quel bassesse!" A mandat is, in effect, an order; and what you purchase is therefore merely an order for a ticket. To secure your seat you must present yourself and your mandat before a board of control. Every Parisian theatre has in its foyer a large upright panelled box, capable of containing three, and occasionally four, persons. These are controleurs, and you cannot pass in without their sanction. Often they represent the management of the theatre, each one, perhaps, representing a different interest, so that it is necessary for each to check and rectify the entries of the other two.
It goes without saying that your name and number is entered therefore, not once, but thrice; and as the bureau of control is flanked and fortified by the surveillance, it is no use your protesting, even if each controleur in turn were to ask you for those details of your birth, nationality, parentage, condition and religion, which every Frenchman has by law a right to demand of foreigners. For the surveillance is an armed force - military gentlemen, resplendent in tunics, trousers, and helmets, carrying loaded guns and sharp bayonets. Your one consolation, as you enter the Odeon, the Vaudeville, tho Renaissance, or the Gymnase is that there are not more than half a dozen of them, and that if their purpose is to intimidate you into witnessing a bad play, you might perhaps overpower the lot. For Heaven has spared Gatil's soldiers many inches.
But to resume. You are now inside the Paris theatre. Crossing the threshold you suddenly come upon an army of ouvreuses. There are never fewer than twelve of them, drawn up in a row. In our largest London theatres we have never a smaller number than two young women to escort patrons to their seats; in Paris they are able to worry along with twelve or fifteen old ones. In London, when a woman gets too old to work we send her to some almshouse or asylum, or make her a caretaker. In Paris she becomes an ouvreuse.
Apropos of the general machinery of a French theatre, one might perhaps allude, with discretion, to the frappeur. He does not act, or shift scenes, or prompt, or assist in dressing the performers, or work the limelight, or sweep out the theatre. His business is merely to give the three thundering knocks which form so delicate and artistic a prelude to each act of each theatrical representation of our friends over the Channel.
As published in the Daily Mail (London), 25th January, 1898.