midnight
IT was two long weeks that the unfortunate Tartarin had been seeking his Algerian flame , and most likely he would have been seeking after her to this day if the little god kind to lovers had not come to his help under the shape of a Montenegrin nobleman . It happened as follows . Every Saturday night in winter there is a masked ball at the Grand Theatre of Algiers , just as at the Paris Opera-House . It is the undying and ever-tasteless county fancy dress ball -- very few people on the floor , several castaways from the Parisian students ' ballrooms or midnight dance-houses , Joans of Arc following the army , faded characters out of the Java costume-book of 1840 , and half-a-dozen laundress 's underlings who are aiming to make loftier conquests , but still preserve a faint perfume of their former life -- garlic and saffron sauce . The real spectacle is not there , but in the green-room , transformed for the nonce into a hall of green cloth or gaming saloon . An enfevered and motley mob hustle one another around the long green table-covers : Turcos out for the day and staking their double halfpence , Moorish traders from the native town , Negroes , Maltese , colonists from the inland , who have come forty leagues in order to risk on a turning card the price of a plough or of a yoke of oxen ; all a-quivering , pale , clenching their teeth , and with that singular , wavering , sidelong look of the gamester , become a squint from always staring at the same card in the lay-out . A little apart are the tribes of Algerian Jews , playing among acquaintances .