The floor was bare and well polished; the air full of tobacco smoke, wine fumes, brandy odors, and an overpowering scent of oil, garlic and pot au feu.

Riotous music pealed through it, that even in its clamor kept a certain silvery ring, a certain rhythmical cadence.

Pipes were smoked, barrack slang, camp slang, barriere slang, temple slang, were chattered volubly.
Theresa's songs were sung by bright-eyed, sallow-cheeked Parisiennes, and chorused by the lusty lungs of Zouaves and Turcos.

Good humor prevailed, though of a wild sort; the mad gallop of the Rigolboche had just flown round the room, like lightning, to the crash and the tumult of the most headlong music that ever set the spurred heels stamping and grisettes' heels flying; and now where the crowds of soldiers and women stood back to leave her a clear place, Cigarette was dancing alone.
She had danced the cancan; she had danced since sunset; she had danced till she had tired out cavalrymen, who could go days and nights in the saddle without a sense of fatigue, and made Spahis cry quarter, who never gave it by any chance in the battlefield; and she was dancing now like a little Bacchante, as fresh as if she had just sprung up from a long summer day's rest.

Dancing as she would dance only now and then, when caprice took her, and her wayward vivacity was at the height, on the green space before a tent full of general officers, on the bare floor of a barrack-room, under the canvas of a fete-day's booth, or as here in the music-hall of a Cafe.
Marshals had more than once essayed to bribe the famous little Friend of the Flag to dance for them, and had failed; but, for a set of soldiers--war-worn, dust-covered, weary with toil and stiff with wounds--she would do it till they forgot their ills and got as intoxicated with it as with champagne.