Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/359

Rh Towards morning, the hour of the last cancans, these crypts of the temple of Momus presented the lugubrious appearance of a community of troglodytes exhausted by too strenuous incantations.

During the length of the carnival Laurent made it a point of honor never to see his bed, nor quit his tattered Pierrot domino.

The street carnival intrigued him no less than the nocturnal dissipations. Loafing in the streets that had been turned over to the maskers, he was wherever the sport was at its giddiest, the crowd most effervescent. The din of horns and rattles reverberated from street to street, and pig-bladders blown up and brandished like clubs beat down with an ill thud upon the backs of wayfarers. Maskers, false sinners, aggravated the crush, and were thrusting forth like fishhooks at the end of lines small loaves of bread smeared with molasses which gamins as frisky and as voracious as ablests were struggling to snatch, though they were only succeeding in smudging their faces.

But Paridael was especially fond of the war of pepernotes, the true originality of Antwerp carnivals. He converted a great part of his last coins into bags of these "pepper nuts," northern confetti, large, cubic hailstones as hard as rocks, which were sold by the butchers, and with which, from afternoon to twilight, hot battles were fought between the ladies crowded in windows or balconies, and the gallants stationed in the streets, or between the riders upon the floats and the pedestrians who passed them in review.

On the afternoon of Shrove-Tuesday Laurent recognized in the recess of a window in the Hotel Saint-Antoine, rented at an enormous tariff for the occasion,