The narrator compares the Grand Hotel at Balbec to a theatre stage, where the guest is like a spectator moving among actors. The hotel's employees are so numerous, like members of a chorus in a theatre, that their presence seems almost decorative:
I could quite well appreciate the charm that this great ‘Palace’ might have for certain persons. It was arranged like a theatre, and a numerous cast filled it to the doors with animation. For all that the visitor was only a sort of spectator, he was perpetually taking part in the performance, and that not as in one of those theatres where the actors perform a play among the audience, but as though the life of the spectator were going on amid the sumptuous fittings of the stage. The lawn-tennis player might come in wearing a white flannel blazer, the porter would have put on a blue frock coat with silver braid before handing him his letters. If this lawn-tennis player did not choose to walk upstairs, he was equally involved with the actors in having by his side, to propel the lift, its attendant no less richly attired. The corridors on each landing engulfed a flying band of nymphlike chambermaids, fair visions against the sea, at whose modest chambers the admirers of feminine beauty arrived by cunning detours. Downstairs, it was the masculine element that predominated and made this hotel, in view of the extreme and effortless youth of the servants, a sort of Judaeo-Christian tragedy given bodily form and perpetually in performance. And so I could not help repeating to myself, when I saw them, […] the lines of Racine […] from Athalie: for in the doorway of the hall, what in the seventeenth century was called the portico, ‘a flourishing race’ of young pages clustered, especially at tea-time, like the young Israelites of Racine’s choruses. But I do not believe that one of them could have given even the vague answer that Joas finds to satisfy Athalie when she inquires of the infant Prince: “What is your office, then?” for they had none. At the most, if one had asked of any of them, like the new Queen:
“But all this race, what do they then, imprisoned in this place?”
he might have said:
“I watch the solemn pomp and bear my part.”
Now and then one of the young supers would approach some more important personage, then this young beauty would rejoin the chorus, and, unless it were the moment for a spell of contemplative relaxation, they would proceed with their useless, reverent, decorative, daily evolutions. For, except on their ‘day off,’ ‘reared in seclusion from the world’ and never crossing the threshold, they led the same ecclesiastical existence as the Levites in Athalie, and as I gazed at that ‘young and faithful troop’ playing at the foot of the steps draped with sumptuous carpets, I felt inclined to ask myself whether I were entering the Grand Hotel at Balbec or the Temple of Solomon.