Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 December 1876 — A Stage Fire Nowadays. [ARTICLE]

A Stage Fire Nowadays.

In a piece by Victor Sejour, entitled “La Madame des Roees,” there was shown a spacious hall in a palace, with a terrace and staircase at the back, which were consumed in the flames. The effects of the servants and others flying through the flames to make their escape, of the falling rafters, the sparks,.the lurid red which filled the whole’scene, was so complete that the spectators rose from their si-ats in alarm. Nothing was more aim-, pie than the agency employed. The ordinary lime-lights turned on to the full, suffused the stage with a flood of light, and seen through crimson glasses imparted a fierce glow of the same tint. Any vapor of the whitest kind moving in such a medium would at once give the notion of volumes of lurid smoke. Accordingly, a few braziers filled with a powder known as “lycopodium” are placed at the wings, each fitted with a sort of forge bellows, each blast producing a sheet of flame and

T• 1 I ! smoke. The lights in front being lowered, rows of little jets, duly screened, are made to follow the tines of tbe beMM, rafters, etc.; and thus make tlmee eJffN stand out against the fiearie blaze. The view, therefore, from behind has thus an almost prosy and orderly aspect, but the effect is complete. There is afl the literal form and surface, as it were, of fire, without the material of fire.—New Quarterly Magazine.