Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 90, June, 1875Various
Science
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 90, June, 1875
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
It is one o'clock in the morning when we leave this scene, and the
place is in full blast. Crossing the Château d'Eau, we plunge into a
quiet street, down which comes a flood of light from an electric lamp
hung before the entrance of the Tivoli Waux-Hall. Within, the
ball-room is thronged. An occasional blouse is visible, but the
blousard who comes here is generally arrayed in some fancy costume,
which he hires for the night for a trifling sum or has devised in his
leisure moments from odds and ends gathered in an old-clo' market.
There is a group of four now prancing in a quadrille, who are
blousards enjoying at once their hours of ease and of triumph. Emulous
of the "artists" of grander balls, they have got themselves up in the
guise of American Indians, and are a sight to behold. Their faces are
painted every color of the rainbow; and when I say painted I do not
mean tricked out with the red and white of toilet-boxes, but daubed
thickly with the kind of paint used in painting houses and
signs--paint which _stays_ in spite of the reeking perspiration which
trickles off their cheeks. They wear no masks, but have pasteboard
noses stuck upon their faces with glue, for they are "got up" for all
night, and this is the proud scene on which they win laurels. Their
dance is a coarse imitation of the gyrations of the professional
cancanists, and they prance and cavort with glowing enthusiasm, happy
in the evident admiration of a surrounding throng of provincials,
pickpockets and prostitutes.
For a more genuine scene of blousard gayety come with me to the Rue
Mouffetard, where there is a ball frequented solely by the lowest and
poorest class of Paris strugglers for bread, such as the ragpickers
and the street-sweepers. At first thought it seems improbable that the
squalid wretches who can barely earn sous enough to live on, to whom
fifty cents a day are fine wages, should have a ball. But all things
are possible in Paris in the way of popular amusements. In the Rue
Mouffetard, then, near the Rue Pot de Fer, we read on the wall of a
gloomy building a yellow advertisement which is translatable thus,
literally:
GREAT HALL OF THE OLD OAK.
MOUFFETARD STREET, 69, HOUSE OF LACROSSE,
_All the Sundays, departing from the first January, up till
Fat Tuesday_.
BALL OF NIGHT!
DRESS, MASK, DISGUISE.
A Grand Orchestra, composed of Artists of Talent, will be
conducted by G. Maurage, who will have performed a Repertory
entirely new, composed of Quadrilles, Valses, Polkas,
Schottisches, Varsoviennes, Mazurkas, Redowas, Lancers, etc.
ENTRANCE--On the Sundays, five cents; at ordinary times, four
cents. One commences at 8 o'clock.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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