Berg has chosen a seat in the very back row, where the light hardly reaches at all. Placed at the side, looking beyond the folds of the open curtains into the darkness in the wings from which the performers generally emerge, we can see a figure, the oval of a face.

"He must have got stage fright," murmurs Berg, his eyes fixed on this dark corner.

He sits there, a little stiffly, with an absent air, as if rejuvenated.

Just then the pianist appears, the young man whose vigilance we had sensed as he waited in the wings. The audience welcomes him with parsimoniously polite applause. I turn to Berg to offer him the folded sheet of the program. But the man appears to be absent, his eyelids lowered, his face impassive. He is no longer there.