Scaramouche: A Romance of the French RevolutionSabatini, Rafael
History
Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution
Sabatini, Rafael
Adventure stories; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Fiction; Love stories; War stories
First went the great travelling chaise, creaking and groaning on its
way, drawn by two of the Flemish horses. It was Pantaloon who drove it,
an obese and massive Pantaloon in a tight-fitting suit of scarlet under
a long brown bed-gown, his countenance adorned by a colossal cardboard
nose. Beside him on the box sat Pierrot in a white smock, with sleeves
that completely covered his hands, loose white trousers, and a black
skull-cap. He had whitened his face with flour, and he made hideous
noises with a trumpet.
On the roof of the coach were assembled Polichinelle, Scaramouche,
Harlequin, and Pasquariel. Polichinelle in black and white, his doublet
cut in the fashion of a century ago, with humps before and behind, a
white frill round his neck and a black mask upon the upper half of his
face, stood in the middle, his feet planted wide to steady him, solemnly
and viciously banging a big drum. The other three were seated each at
one of the corners of the roof, their legs dangling over. Scaramouche,
all in black in the Spanish fashion of the seventeenth century, his
face adorned with a pair of mostachios, jangled a guitar discordantly.
Harlequin, ragged and patched in every colour of the rainbow, with his
leather girdle and sword of lath, the upper half of his face smeared
in soot, clashed a pair of cymbals intermittently. Pasquariel, as an
apothecary in skull-cap and white apron, excited the hilarity of the
onlookers by his enormous tin clyster, which emitted when pumped a
dolorous squeak.
Within the chaise itself, but showing themselves freely at the windows,
and exchanging quips with the townsfolk, sat the three ladies of the
company. Climene, the amoureuse, beautifully gowned in flowered satin,
her own clustering ringlets concealed under a pumpkin-shaped wig, looked
so much the lady of fashion that you might have wondered what she was
doing in that fantastic rabble. Madame, as the mother, was also dressed
with splendour, but exaggerated to achieve the ridiculous. Her headdress
was a monstrous structure adorned with flowers, and superimposed by
little ostrich plumes. Columbine sat facing them, her back to the
horses, falsely demure, in milkmaid bonnet of white muslin, and a
striped gown of green and blue.
The marvel was that the old chaise, which in its halcyon days may have
served to carry some dignitary of the Church, did not founder instead of
merely groaning under that excessive and ribald load.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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