Vaudeville audiences… could give the loudest sighs I have ever heard. Prisoners in the Bastille couldn’t have touched them.

Davies humorously contrasts the melodramatic responsiveness of vaudeville crowds with the stereotypical despair of political prisoners. The “loudest sighs” suggests an audience trained to participate—audibly registering sympathy, boredom, or mock-tragedy on cue—turning emotion into a kind of performance. By invoking the Bastille, a symbol of extreme confinement and suffering, he exaggerates for comic effect: even those with the strongest reason to sigh could not match the theatrical intensity of vaudeville patrons. The line also hints at Davies’s broader interest in performance, taste, and the social rituals of entertainment—how audiences help create the show they watch.