In the orchestra stalls, the drugget covering them looked like an angry sea, whose glaucous waves had been suddenly rendered stationary by a secret order from the storm phantom, who, as everybody knows, is called Adamastor.

MM.

Moncharmin and Richard were the shipwrecked mariners amid this motionless turmoil of a calico sea.
They made for the left boxes, plowing their way like sailors who leave their ship and try to struggle to the shore.

The eight great polished columns stood up in the dusk like so many huge piles supporting the threatening, crumbling, big-bellied cliffs whose layers were represented by the circular, parallel, waving lines of the balconies of the grand, first and second tiers of boxes.

At the top, right on top of the cliff, lost in M.Lenepveu's copper ceiling, figures grinned and grimaced, laughed and jeered at MM.