Page 2296 - les-miserables

had disguised itself as Venice. Such Shrove Tuesdays are no
longer to be seen now-a-days. Everything which exists be-
ing a scattered Carnival, there is no longer any Carnival.
The sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians and the
windows with curious spectators. The terraces which crown
the peristyles of the theatres were bordered with spectators.
Besides the maskers, they stared at that procession—pecu-
liar to Shrove Tuesday as to Longchamps,— of vehicles of
every description, citadines, tapissieres, carioles, cabrio-
lets marching in order, rigorously riveted to each other by
the police regulations, and locked into rails, as it were. Any
one in these vehicles is at once a spectator and a spectacle.
Police-sergeants maintained, on the sides of the boulevard,
these two interminable parallel files, moving in contrary
directions, and saw to it that nothing interfered with that
double current, those two brooks of carriages, flowing, the
one down stream, the other up stream, the one towards the
Chaussee d’Antin, the other towards the Faubourg Saint-
Antoine. The carriages of the peers of France and of the
Ambassadors, emblazoned with coats of arms, held the
middle of the way, going and coming freely. Certain joyous
and magnificent trains, notably that of the Boeuf Gras, had
the same privilege. In this gayety of Paris, England cracked
her whip; Lord Seymour’s post-chaise, harassed by a nick-
name from the populace, passed with great noise.
In the double file, along which the municipal guards gal-
loped like sheep-dogs, honest family coaches, loaded down
with great-aunts and grandmothers, displayed at their doors
fresh groups of children in disguise, Clowns of seven years

2296 Les Miserables