Theater pit, is the empty surface, or the space, in our playhouses located between the walls surrounding the loges on two sides and the orchestra and the amphitheater on the others. This is where the spectator is most uncomfortable, and where the tickets cost the least.

It is not without reason that people have wondered if it would be advantageous to have the spectators seated in our parterres , as they are in Italy. It has been noted that in a parterre where one is standing, everything is perceived with greater enthusiasm. The anxiety, the surprise, the emotions of the ridiculous and the pathetic, all of this is livelier and more rapidly felt. One would think, following the old proverb sedens fit sapientior , that the calmer spectator would be more detached, more reflective, less susceptible to illusions; more indulgent perhaps, but also less disposed to those sensations of rapturous drunkenness that arise in a parterre where one stands.

One cannot calculate what the commonly shared emotions of a crowded multitude adds to each individual's emotional experience. Imagine five hundred mirrors bouncing light back and forth, or five hundred echoes of the same sound; this is the image of a public moved by the ridiculous or the pathetic. It is in this case above all others that examples become contagious and powerful. At first one chuckles at the impression that makes an object laughable, or one receives a direct impression that renders an object moving. But then, one laughs to be seen laughing, and one cries to be seen crying, and the effect of repeating these emotions quite often leads to convulsive laughter, or to a suffocating sense of sorrow. Now it is above all in the parterre , the standing parterre , that one encounters this type of sudden, strong, and rapid electricity. The physical cause lies with the more arduous, less apathetic situation of the spectator, who is constantly in motion due to the continual discomfort and the perpetual undulation of the pit.

A greater difference, however, between a standing parterre and one that is sitting, is the nature of the spectators themselves. For us, the parterre (because one also uses that name for the part of the audience that occupies the space we are discussing) is usually made up of the citizens who are the least rich, the least well-mannered, the least refined in their morals; of those who are naturally less polite, but also the least altered; of those who, by opinion and by sentiment, are the least beholden to the passing fancies of style, to the pretentions of vanity, to the prejudices of education; of those who, taken together, are the least enlightened, but may also have the most common sense, and in whom the most healthy reason and the most naïve sensibility combine to form a taste that is less delicate, but surer, than the airy and fantastical taste of a world where all one's sentiments are false or borrowed.

The parterre is a poor judge during a play's first run, because it is impassioned, corrupted, and debased by cabales. But when the success of a play is decided, and favor and envy no longer divide the minds, the parterre is the best of all judges. It is surprising to see with what unanimous and sudden vivacity all the finesse, the delicacy, the heroism, the grandeur of the soul, all the beauties of Racine, Corneille, and Molière, finally all that is the most ingenious and exquisite in sentiment, wit, language, and the actors' skill, is immediately perceived by five hundred men at once. Likewise, it is astonishing to see the wisdom with which the slightest and most fugitive errors against taste, nature, truth, and propriety, whether of language or of morals, are apprehended by a class of men who, individually, never notice anything of the sort. It is difficult to understand, for example, how the roles of Viriatus, Agrippina, and "The Wicked One" are so well evaluated by the people, but one must say that within the parterre not everyone is of the people, and that among this crowd of uncultured men, there are some who are quite enlightened. Now, it is the judgement of this small group which shapes that of the parterre ; the multitude listens to them, and is not so vain as to be humiliated by their lessons. In the loges, however, everyone believes themselves cultured. Everyone pretends to be able to judge for themselves.

There is a difference which, by some standards, favors the loges, but which also does not decide things in favor of the parterre : in the latter there is no flirtation, because there are no women. The taste of the parterre is less delicate, but also less capricious, and above all more masculine and more firm.

To the small number of cultured men spread throughout the parterre one should add a larger number of theater aficionados for whom the stage is their only pleasure. Years of theatergoing have shaped their taste, and their comparative taste is often surer than a more reasoned judgement. It is as though a sort of instinct has perfected their habits. In this regard, the parterre changes when a troupe moves to a new venue, because their regulars do not follow them. It has been noticed, for example, that since the Comédie-Française has been at the Tuileries Palace, its parterre has not displayed the usual wisdom it did when the troupe performed in the Saint-Germain neighborhood. A new parterre is like a pack of young hunting dogs, easily put on the wrong scent.

For the same reason, the dominant taste of the public, on the same day and in the same town, is not the same from one venue to another. The difference is not in the loges, because the same group circulates from the loges of one spectacle to another. It is in the habitual part of the public, those who are called the "pillars of the parterre ". This group sets the tone, and it is its indulgence or severity, its good or bad humor, its naturally uncultivated opinion or its delicacy, its taste which is more or less difficult, more or less refined, that by contagion communicates itself to the loges, and creates the ambiance in that place at that moment.

Finally, the bulk of the parterre is composed of men without culture or pretentions whose ingenious sensibility derives from a habit of giving themselves over to the impressions they receive from the play and who, what's more, following an impulse unite with more enlightened spectators who get them to follow their thoughts and sentiments. Together, they form but one wit and one soul.

These are the origins of that singular wisdom, that admirable promptness with which an entire parterre grasps at once the beauties and the defects of a play. It is also due to these phenomena that certain delicate or transcendent beauties are not felt right away, because the influence of the better sort is not always equally rapid, even though the part of the public which is the least vain is also that which corrects itself and retracts its views most easily. It is the parterre that avenged the Phèdre of Racine for the preference given by the loges to the Phèdre of Pradon.

Such is the composition and the mixture of that part of the public here in France that consents to stand and be quite uncomfortable most of the time in exchange for inexpensive entrance to the theater.

But if the parterre were seated it would an entirely different story, in part because ticket prices would go up, and in part because spectators would be more comfortable. Then the public of the loges and of the parterre would be the same, and the sentiments of the parterre would no longer have either the same liberty, or the same ingenuity, or, I dare say, the same enlightenment. This is because, as I have said, ignorant spectators are modest enough to be schooled, and to listen to learned people. In the loges, however, and in consequence in the seated parterre as well, ignorance is presumptuous; everything is caprice, vanity, fantasy, or prejudice.

One might think I exaggerate, but I am persuaded that if the parterre , such as it is, does not encapsulate public opinion, and does not reduce it to a single, unified voice, there would often be as many diverse judgements as there are places in the loges, and for a long time the fate of a play would not be unanimously nor decisively determined.

It is at the very least true that the type of republic that composes our theaters would change its nature, and that the democracy of the parterre would degenerate into aristocracy; less license and tumultuousness, but also less liberty, less ingenuity, less warmth, and less frankness and integrity. It is from the parterre , the free parterre , that applause erupts. That applause is the soul of emulation, the explosion of sentiment, the public sanction of private judgements; it is like the signal that all the souls give each other to rejoice at the same time, and then to redouble the depth of their rejoicing by this mutual, rapid communication of their common emotion. In a playhouse where one does not applaud, sentiments will always be frigid, and judgements indecisive.

I must not, however, conceal that the quite natural desire to earn applause could have harmed the taste of poets and the playing of actors by making them prefer the more spectacular to that which is truer, more natural, and more purely beautiful. Thus we have those sententious verses detached from the action, those brilliant tirades in which, at the expense of realistic dialogue, the actor appears to gather his forces to stagger the parterre and to astonish it with magisterial acts, that violent style of play, those exaggertaed movements with which the actor, at the end of a reply or a monologue, extracts applause.

But this type of charlatanism, which the more enlightened parterre will eventually perceive, and which it will bring to a halt by itself, would perhaps appear even more necessary to move a seated parterre , one that was even less sensitive to the joys of the stage, even though it might enjoy the spectacle more comfortably. This pleasure is like all the others; the trouble it provokes makes it more valuable, and it is not much appreciated when it comes too easily. It might be that a standing parterre would be more problematic among a more disorderly people, or yield fewer advantages among a people where sensibilities, heightened by the climate, would be easier to stimulate. But I am speaking here of the French, and I am relying on the advice of the actors themselves which, although biased, deserves some attention.