Washing up last night I got thinking about a pastel I used to pass twice a shift. Stand close to one of those rehearsal rooms and the floor is nothing but chalk dragged sideways, green-grey smears going off toward the mirrored door, and while the old man in the white jacket leans on his long cane one of the girls has stopped bothering with any of it and is scratching her back. He died in Paris in 1917, at eighty-three.
Fabien, his sight had been going since his forties — some sort of retinal trouble, never really pinned down, and he complained about glare and central blur rather than going dark. Pastel suits a failing eye better than oil: you work by touch and pressure, close up, and you can judge the mark with the side of your vision. So those broad dragged chalks are partly a man adapting.
Fabien, he spent hours in the wings and the corridors at the Opéra, which is why so many of them are yawning or fixing a shoe strap — that's dancers between things, not dancers performing. Backstage light is flat and unkind and he kept it anyway.