Young girls, the petits rats pulled from the hills of Montmartre to be background dancers, ran through the halls laughing, the excitement of an upcoming performance suffusing their thin faces with pleasure. The smell of fresh paint and turpentine mingled with the sounds of workers pounding away with hammers and the string section warming up for rehearsal. While the ornate marble rooms and plush red velvet seats stood empty, backstage was a hive of activity. They had caused rather enough trouble over the last decade, after all. No one asked what the poor of Paris thought. To the rich and fashionable of Paris, it was also a symbol of opulence and sin-which, as every aspiring sophisticate knows, are the crucial ingredients of a good time. To the pious folk of the countryside, it was a symbol of the opulence and sin that had plunged France into years of war and civil strife, surely a punishment from God for the decadence of Paris during the Second Empire. Magnificent and vast, built of gold and marble atop a dead arm of the river Seine, the theater was the most celebrated and reviled building in all of France before its first stone was even laid. The Palais Garnier was three days away from dress rehearsals.
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