Not a sound came from the wings: the staircase and the passages were deadly still.
That choking sensation of quiet, which behind the scenes immediately precedes the end of an act, had begun to pervade the empty greenroom.
Indeed, the place seemed to be drowsing off through very breathlessness amid that faint murmur which the stage gives forth when the whole troupe are raising the deafening uproar of some grand finale.
"Oh, the cows!" Bordenave suddenly shouted in his hoarse voice.
He had only just come up, and he was already howling complaints about two chorus girls who had nearly fallen flat on the stage because they were playing the fool together.

When his eye lit on Mignon and Fauchery he called them; he wanted to show them something.

The prince had just notified a desire to compliment Nana in her dressing room during the next interval.

But as he was leading them into the wings the stage manager passed.
"Just you find those hags Fernande and Maria!" cried Bordenave savagely.
Then calming down and endeavoring to assume the dignified expression worn by "heavy fathers," he wiped his face with his pocket handkerchief and added: "I am now going to receive His Highness." The curtain fell amid a long-drawn salvo of applause.

Then across the twilight stage, which was no longer lit up by the footlights, there followed a disorderly retreat.