The accounts of Louis XI. allot to the bailiff of the palace “twenty sous, Tournois, for three coaches of mascarades in the crossroads.”
In our day, these noisy heaps of creatures are accustomed to have themselves driven in some ancient cuckoo carriage, whose imperial they load down, or they overwhelm a hired landau, with its top thrown back, with their tumultuous groups.
Twenty of them ride in a carriage intended for six.
They cling to the seats, to the rumble, on the cheeks of the hood, on the shafts.
They even bestride the carriage lamps.
They stand, sit, lie, with their knees drawn up in a knot, and their legs hanging.
The women sit on the men’s laps.
Far away, above the throng of heads, their wild pyramid is visible.
These carriage-loads form mountains of mirth in the midst of the rout.
Colle, Panard and Piron flow from it, enriched with slang.
This carriage which has become colossal through its freight, has an air of conquest.
Uproar reigns in front, tumult behind.
People vociferate, shout, howl, there they break forth and writhe with enjoyment; gayety roars; sarcasm flames forth, joviality is flaunted like a red flag; two jades there drag farce blossomed forth into an apotheosis; it is the triumphal car of laughter.
A laughter that is too cynical to be frank.
In truth, this laughter is suspicious.
This laughter has a mission.
It is charged with proving the Carnival to the Parisians.
These fishwife vehicles, in which one feels one knows not what shadows, set the philosopher to thinking.
There is government therein.
There one lays one’s finger on a mysterious affinity between public men and public women.
It certainly is sad that turpitude heaped up should give a sum total of gayety, that by piling ignominy upon opprobrium the people should be enticed, that the system of spying, and serving as caryatids to prostitution should amuse the rabble when it confronts them, that the crowd loves to behold that monstrous living pile of tinsel rags, half dung, half light, roll by on four wheels howling and laughing, that they should clap their hands at this glory composed of all shames, that there would be no festival for the populace, did not the police promenade in their midst these sorts of twenty-headed hydras of joy.
But what can be done about it?
These be-ribboned and be-flowered tumbrils of mire are insulted and pardoned by the laughter of the public.
The laughter of all is the accomplice of universal degradation.
Certain unhealthy festivals disaggregate the people and convert them into the populace. And populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons.
The King has Roquelaure, the populace has the Merry-Andrew.
Paris is a great, mad city on every occasion that it is a great sublime city.
There the Carnival forms part of politics.
Paris,—let us confess it—willingly allows infamy to furnish it with comedy.
She only demands of her masters—when she has masters—one thing:
“Paint me the mud.”
Rome was of the same mind.
She loved Nero.
Nero was a titanic lighterman.
Chance ordained, as we have just said, that one of these shapeless clusters of masked men and women, dragged about on a vast calash, should halt on the left of the boulevard, while the wedding train halted on the right.
The carriage-load of masks caught sight of the wedding carriage containing the bridal party opposite them on the other side of the boulevard.
“Hullo!” said a masker, “here’s a wedding.”
“A sham wedding,” retorted another. “We are the genuine article.”
And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and fearing also, the rebuke of the police, the two maskers turned their eyes elsewhere.
At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers had their hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the crowd’s caress to masquerades; and the two maskers who had just spoken had to face the throng with their comrades, and did not find the entire repertory of projectiles of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort to the enormous verbal attacks of the populace.
A frightful exchange of metaphors took place between the maskers and the crowd.
In the meanwhile, two other maskers in the same carriage, a Spaniard with an enormous nose, an elderly air, and huge black moustache, and a gaunt fishwife, who was quite a young girl, masked with a loup,67 had also noticed the wedding, and while their companions and the passers-by were exchanging insults, they had held a dialogue in a low voice.
Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it.
The gusts of rain had drenched the front of the vehicle, which was wide open; the breezes of February are not warm; as the fishwife, clad in a low-necked gown, replied to the Spaniard, she shivered, laughed and coughed.
Here is their dialogue:
“Say, now.”
“What, daddy?”
“Do you see that old cove?”
“What old cove?”
“Yonder, in the first wedding-cart, on our side.”