British Kabukicho Girl

The English dancing girls are performers at the Tarapout whose bright, disciplined stage routine becomes, for Ferdinand Bardamu, an unwitting expression of misery. Their contrast between lavish theatrical surroundings and the sorrow he hears in their song turns them into a chorus of the novel’s bleakest insight: suffering can speak through a performance its performers mistake for love.

Work at the Tarapout

The girls perform in a successful variety show, where Bardamu finds temporary employment as a silent actor. Backstage, he encounters a warm, perfumed world of dressing rooms in which the women joke and flirt while waiting for their turn. He is relieved to have found work again, and their welcome matters to him: among these colleagues, he feels neither examined nor despised.

The production surrounds their act with the signs of prosperity. The theater is full of lights, luxurious fittings, soap, and sandwiches; the girls sing and dance while Bardamu stands in a small, essential part. Their number is presented as an exotic scene set in Turkestan. For fifteen minutes, the performers sing and dance with such force that Bardamu sees their routine as an exhausting demand, repeated five times a day. Their energy seems tireless, almost mechanical, while the work itself remains a livelihood enacted under bright lights.

For four months Bardamu stays at the Tarapout, regularly paid and dressed for different roles, including a prince, a centurion, and an aviator. He describes the job as an improbable interval of comfort: there is enough food, and he can live like a coupon clipper without actually possessing coupons. The girls belong to this brief refuge from poverty, but its security proves temporary. When the theater changes the number, the act that had seemed merely entertaining becomes the occasion for Bardamu’s return to misery.

The London Embankment song

The change comes when the performers are assigned a new sketch set on the London Embankment. Bardamu’s silent part is now that of a policeman pacing in front of a parapet. The girls sing, ostensibly beside the Thames at night, and their song catches him unprepared. Their voices and movements bring back the world’s suffering and his own; the imagined fog and the scene’s lament seem to fill even the luxurious theater with distress.

The women continue to smile and fling out their legs in time with the music, while Bardamu hears something at odds with their apparent gaiety. To him, the song carries a sorrow much larger than its supposed subject: the performers understand it as a little romantic setback, but he hears a lament for existence. Its force lies in that mismatch. They do not set out to articulate despair, yet he experiences their performance as if misery had found a sure way to reach him through it.

Bardamu does not intervene. He watches the routine and believes its catastrophe is already coming, although he cannot prevent it. In his reading, the girls’ sadness is not a disguise that their costumes and smiles can remove. The stage’s spangles and lights offer no protection from the hardship he senses underneath. Their act makes visible, without their conscious intention, a misery that performance can adorn but cannot contain.

Love and misery

Bardamu interprets the girls’ understanding of their own song as a consequence of youth: they take a general and overwhelming unhappiness for love trouble because that is the language they have been taught to use. Their performance exposes the narrowness of that explanation. The sadness he hears is not, in his account, simply a lover’s complaint; it belongs to a condition of life that romantic lyrics can awaken without naming or resolving.

His meditation turns particularly harsh when he imagines what lies beyond the performers’ rosy youth. He sees them as already caught in misery, despite their costumes, lights, and smiles. That reading collapses the apparent boundary between backstage hardship and stage glamour: the song does not bring misery into an otherwise untouched world but gives it a public form. For Bardamu, the girls’ bodies and voices carry what their theatrical presentation is meant to soften.

The conclusion he draws is absolute: love itself is misery, not an escape from it. The girls’ repeated performance intensifies that conviction because the song continues as entertainment even after Bardamu has heard its sorrow. The routine does not cure the feeling or teach its performers what it means. It makes unhappiness into an amusement for an audience, while the person listening recognizes something more destructive beneath the familiar convention of the love song.

Illness and the song’s afterlife

The girls’ encounter with hardship becomes literal when one of them falls ill and a Polish performer is hired to replace her. The replacement, Tania, also coughs, and Bardamu quickly befriends her. The group’s song continues, but the scene now includes illness as well as the sorrow he had already attributed to their performance. Tania has her own consuming romantic attachment, and Bardamu sees her as readily absorbed into the same lament.

He describes the song’s effect as gradual rather than immediate. It begins like a popular tune that appears to mean little; then the listener’s spirits sink, attention turns to the words, and the feeling persists after the melody has ended. The song becomes associated with death and forgetfulness, as though its final destination were not romantic fulfillment but the grave. This progression—from easy entertainment to a lingering sense of despair—echoes the way the Tarapout’s polished spectacle had already given way, for Bardamu, to the misery it concealed.

The performers therefore matter less as individuals with fully disclosed lives than as a collective presence through which the novel stages a conflict between appearance and experience. Their precision, bright surroundings, and repeated song promise a manageable theatrical pleasure; Bardamu hears an involuntary testimony to suffering. The gap between what they mean to sing and what he believes they reveal makes their act a turning point in his temporary refuge at the Tarapout, and an image of how readily entertainment can become a vehicle for truths its performers do not know they are voicing.