After kissing the young girl, the ghost of the rose leaps out the window… and drops down among the attendants, who spit water in his face and rub him down with Turkish towels, like a boxer. What a combination of grace and brutality! I will always hear the thunder of the applause; I will always see that young man smeared with rouge, gasping, sweating, pressing one hand to his heart and holding onto a prop with the other, or even collapsed in a chair. Then, after being slapped, sprayed, and shaken, he went back before the curtain to bow and smile.
–Jean Cocteau on Vaslav Nijinsky in La Spectre de la rose; quoted in Dance Anecdotes