nd, a rare firmness
of character, in young women, to traverse, in this fashion, a great
city plunged in consternation and terror--to fall in at every step with
litters loaded with the dying, and carriages filled with the dead--to
defy, as it were, in a spirit of strange pleasantry, the plague that was
detonating the Parisians. It is certain that, in Paris alone, and
there only amongst a peculiar class, could such an idea have ever been
conceived or realized. Two men, grotesquely disguised as postilions at
a funeral, with formidable false noses, rose-colored crape hat-bands and
large favors of roses and crape bows at their buttonholes, rode before
the vehicle. Upon the platform of the car were groups of allegorical
personages, representing WINE, PLEASURE, LOVE, PLAY. The mission of
these symbolical beings was, by means of jokes, sarcasms, and mockeries,
to plague the life out of Goodman Cholera, a sort of funeral and
burlesque Cassander, whom they ridiculed and made game of in a hundred
ways. The moral of the play was this: "To brave Cholera in security, let
us drink, laugh, game, and make love!"

WINE was represented by a huge, lusty Silenus, thick-set, and with
swollen paunch, a crown of ivy on his brow, a panther's skin across his
shoulder, and in his hand a large gilt goblet, wreathed with flowers.
None other than Ninny Moulin, the famous moral and religious writer,
could have exhibited to the astonished and delighted spectators an
ear of so deep a scarlet, so majestic an abdomen, and a face of such
triumphant and majestic fulness. Every moment, Ninny Moulin appeared to
empty his cup--after which he burst out laughing in the face of Goodman
Cholera. Goodman Cholera, a cadaverous pantaloon, was half-enveloped in
a shroud; his mask of greenish cardboard, with red, hollow eyes, seemed
every moment to grin as in mockery of death; from beneath his powdered
peruke, surmounted by a pyramidical cotton night-cap, appeared his neck
and arm, dyed of a bright green color; his lean hand, which shook almost
always with a feverish trembling (not feigned, but natural), rested upon
a crutch-handled cane; finally, as was becoming in a pantaloon, he wore
red stockings, with buckles at the knees, and high slippers of black
beaver. This grotesque representative of the cholera was Sleepinbuff.

Notwithstanding a slow and dangerous fever, caused by the excessive use
of brandy, and by constant debauchery, that was silently undermining his