The Underground World: A mirror of life below the surfaceKnox, Thomas Wallace
History
The Underground World: A mirror of life below the surface
Knox, Thomas Wallace
Caves; Mines and mineral resources; Social history -- 19th century; Tunnels
The Château Rouge is a more extended, demonstrative, and free-and-easy
place of resort than the Mabille. It is much more democratic also;
the prices of admission for men (women are admitted without charge)
being one franc, instead of three. To encourage attendance, prizes are
offered to those who shall be present the greatest number of nights
during the season, and the announcement of the prizes is placarded
upon the wall, so that every one may see them. Silk gowns are the
temptations for the gentler, and watches for the sterner sex. I should
imagine that some of the girls expected a reward for lifting their
gaiters in a direct line above their heads, so often do they attempt
it, and so generally do they succeed.
The Closerie de Lilas, called the Prado in winter, is the place where
the students and the grisettes go in crowds, and where they whirl
and make merry for the pure love of the thing. The attendance is
very large on Thursday and Sunday nights, when I have seen five or
six hundred persons of both sexes, flushed with wine, and dancing
like mad dervishes. The revels there are fast and furious enough.
License reigns supreme, and Bacchus and Venus seem to inspire the
orgies. Paris always limits its public exhibitions, and minions of the
law are ever present to keep licentiousness within bounds. Without
stimulants the grisettes and cocottes become wild with excitement as
the music of Offenbach pours out under the sky to infect them with
its sensuous frenzy. Doubtless the students and their lemans enjoy
themselves to the utmost; for they could not counterfeit enjoyment so
excellently. They smoke, and drink, and laugh, and talk, and chat, and
caper together without the smallest reserve or restraint, as if they
had not, and never would have, any other thought than of the present
moment and its absorbing pleasure.
[Sidenote: A DELIRIUM OF DANCING.]
When the weather is unfavorable, they have their balls in a large,
covered space; and to see and hear them leaping, tumbling, screaming,
and roaring in one confused and palpitating mass, impresses the
self-contained and impassive Anglo-Saxon very strangely. Those French
revellers have few concealments. They do their wooing in the presence
of hundreds; they have their little quarrels in the midst of their
carnival of glee. Elise appeals to Jacques with shrugs and starts, and
streaming eyes; and Victoire complains of neglect, and emphasizes his
jealousy to Marguerite before the giddy throng, as if they were in
the privacy of their own apartments. They make up their differences
with petting words and copious caresses, and enact their melodramas
regardless of curious eyes and smiling lookers-on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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