found emotion: “How beautifully those clothes act on Mr. X.” For he too had had a part in the success: he had had to run all over Prague to match that flannel; he had stuffed wadding into those breasts with a sculptor’s skill; and he had expended ingenuity worthy of an engineer upon the protruding coat-tails.
Nor must we forget the hairdresser. His workshop, hidden somewhere in the furthermost depths of the theatre, seems like a savage temple in Melanesia, or an Indian wigwam. Here you see lying casually about next to fair, girlish tresses and bald heads of every description, wigs of all kinds and colours, curly, long-haired, black, ginger, iron-grey, and silvery. Severed heads with their necks as pedestals stand about on tables, and nearby are to be found several sorts of noses, the pointed noses of fools and drunkards, and the straight noses of knights and intriguers, shaggy eyebrows, curious beards, moustaches of all kinds, beards for bandits, noble fathers, foresters, and monks. Indeed, the tables are
96
