Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 04.djvu/316

 the kind they call Victim Balls, Bals à Victime. The dancers, in choice costume, have all crape round the left arm: to be admitted, it needs that you be a Victime; that you have lost a relative under the Terror, Peace to the Dead; let us dance to their memory! For in all ways one must dance.

It is very remarkable, according to Mercier, under what varieties of figure this great business of dancing goes on. 'The women,' says he, 'are Nymphs, Sultanas; sometimes Minervas, Junos, even Dianas. In lightly-unerring gyrations they swim there; with such earnestness of purpose; with perfect silence, so absorbed are they. What is singular,' continues he, 'the onlookers are as it were mingled with the dancers; form, as it were, a circumambient element round the different contre-dances, yet without deranging them. It is rare, in fact, that a Sultana in such circumstances experiences the smallest collision. Her pretty foot darts down, an inch from mine; she is off again; she is as a flash of light: but soon the measure recalls her to the point she set out from. Like a glittering comet she travels her ellipse; revolving on herself, as by a double effect of gravitation and attraction.' Looking forward a little way, into Time, the same Mercier discerns Merveilleuses in 'flesh-coloured drawers' with gold circlets; mere dancing Houris of an artificial Mahomet's-Paradise: much too Mahometan. Montgaillard, with his splenetic eye, notes a no less strange thing; that every fashionable Citoyenne you meet is in an interesting situation. Good Heavens, every? Mere pillows and stuffing! adds the acrid man;—such in a time of depopulation by war and guillotine, being the fashion. No further seek its merits to disclose.

Behold also, instead of the old grim Tappe-durs of Robespierre, what new street-groups are these? Young men habited not in black-shag Carmagnole spencer, but in superfine habit carré, or spencer with rectangular tail appended to it; 'square-tailed coat,' with elegant anti-guillotinish specialty of collar;