The Paris Sketch Book of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh; and the Irish Sketch BookThackeray, William Makepeace
General
The Paris Sketch Book of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh; and the Irish Sketch Book
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Ireland -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- Description and travel
The rest of the letter is on matters of finance, equally curious and
instructive. But pause we for the present, to consider the fashionable
part: and, caricature as it is, we have an accurate picture of the
actual French dandy. Bets, breakfasts, riding, dinners at the Café de
Paris, and delirious Carnival balls: the animal goes through all such
frantic pleasures at the season that precedes Lent. He has a wondrous
respect for English ‘gentlemen-sportsmen;’ he imitates their
clubs--their love of horse-flesh: he calls his palefrenier a groom,
wears blue bird’s-eye neckcloths, sports his pink out hunting, rides
steeplechases, and has his Jockey Club. The ‘tigers and lions’ alluded
to in the report have been borrowed from our own country, and a great
compliment is it to Monsieur de Bernard, the writer of the above amusing
sketch, that he has such a knowledge of English names and things, as to
give a Tory lord the decent title of Lord Cobham, and to call his dog
O’Connell. Paul de Kock calls an English nobleman, in one of his last
novels, _Lord Boulingrog_, and appears vastly delighted at the
verisimilitude of the title.
For the ‘rugissements et bondissements, bacchanale et saturnale, galop
infernal, ronde du sabbat, tout le tremblement,’ these words give a most
clear untranslatable idea of the Carnival ball. A sight more hideous can
hardly strike a man’s eye. I was present at one where the four thousand
guests whirled screaming, reeling, roaring, out of the ballroom in the
Rue St. Honoré, and tore down to the column in the Place Vendôme, round
which they went shrieking their own music, twenty miles an hour, and so
tore madly back again. Let a man go alone to such a place of amusement,
and the sight for him is perfectly terrible: the horrid frantic gaiety
of the place puts him in mind more of the merriment of demons than of
men: bang, bang, drums, trumpets, chairs, pistol-shots, pour out of the
orchestra, which seems as mad as the dancers; whizz, a whirlwind of
paint and patches, all the costumes under the sun, all the ranks in the
empire, all the he and she scoundrels of the capital, writhed and
twisted together, rush by you. If a man falls, woe be to him: two
thousand screaming menads go trampling over his carcass; they have
neither power nor will to stop.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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