Silver-plated tea service with gadrooned body, marked E.C. for Emma Calvé, including a pot, a sugar bowl, a pot with handle, a tea strainer. At the end of the 19th century, the lorgnette was much more than an optical instrument: it embodied a way of inhabiting the opera house. Discreet yet expressive, it enabled its elegant owners - or their indiscreet neighbors - to observe the stage... and the parterre. Balzac evokes it in La Comédie humaine, when a character, "camped on the balcony of the dressing room, spyglass raised, scrutinizes the auditorium with as much interest as the show". In Zola's Nana, it's a debutante actress whom the lorgnettes scrutinize more than they admire: "All the lorgnettes had risen, leered at her, turned her around, like an object put up for auction." A testament to a lyrical art of living, it speaks of curiosity, appearances and the magic of theater.