France -- History -- Louis XVI, 1774-1793; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799
Of what is lighter, especially if it be light as wind, how much
easier the freightage! Non-Admiral Duke de Chartres (not yet
d’Orléans or Egalité) flies to and fro across the Strait;
importing English Fashions; this he, as hand-and-glove with an
English Prince of Wales, is surely qualified to do. Carriages and
saddles; top-boots and _rédingotes_, as we call riding-coats. Nay
the very mode of riding: for now no man on a level with his age
but will trot _à l’Anglaise_, rising in the stirrups; scornful of
the old sitfast method, in which, according to Shakspeare,
“butter and eggs” go to market. Also, he can urge the fervid
wheels, this brave Chartres of ours; no whip in Paris is rasher
and surer than the unprofessional one of Monseigneur.
Elf _jokeis_, we have seen; but see now real Yorkshire jockeys,
and what they ride on, and train: English racers for French
Races. These likewise we owe first (under the Providence of the
Devil) to Monseigneur. Prince d’Artois also has his stud of
racers. Prince d’Artois has withal the strangest horseleech: a
moonstruck, much-enduring individual, of Neuchâtel in
Switzerland,—named _Jean Paul Marat_. A problematic Chevalier
d’Eon, now in petticoats, now in breeches, is no less problematic
in London than in Paris; and causes bets and lawsuits. Beautiful
days of international communion! Swindlery and Blackguardism have
stretched hands across the Channel, and saluted mutually: on the
racecourse of Vincennes or Sablons, behold in English
curricle-and-four, wafted glorious among the principalities and
rascalities, an English Dr. Dodd,[43]—for whom also the too early
gallows gapes.
Duke de Chartres was a young Prince of great promise, as young
Princes often are; which promise unfortunately has belied itself.
With the huge Orléans Property, with Duke de Penthievre for
Father-in-law (and now the young Brother-in-law Lamballe killed
by excesses),—he will one day be the richest man in France.
Meanwhile, “his hair is all falling out, his blood is quite
spoiled,”—by early transcendentalism of debauchery. Carbuncles
stud his face; dark studs on a ground of burnished copper. A most
signal failure, this young Prince! The stuff prematurely burnt
out of him: little left but foul smoke and ashes of expiring
sensualities: what might have been Thought, Insight, and even
Conduct, gone now, or fast going,—to confused darkness, broken by
bewildering dazzlements; to obstreperous crotchets; to activities
which you may call semi-delirious, or even semi-galvanic! Paris
affects to laugh at his charioteering; but he heeds not such
laughter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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