e
street after dinner; ideas are exchanged:

"What a celebration it will be, my friend; what a celebration!"

"Have you heard the news? All the rulers are coming incognito, as
bourgeois, in order to see it."

"I hear that the Emperor of Russia has arrived; he expects to go about
everywhere with the Prince of Wales."

"It certainly will be a fine celebration!"

It is going to a celebration; what Monsieur Patissot, Parisian bourgeois,
calls a celebration; one of these nameless tumults which, for fifteen
hours, roll from one end of the city to the other, every ugly specimen
togged out in its finest, a mob of perspiring bodies, where side by side
are tossed about the stout gossip bedecked in red, white and blue
ribbons, grown fat behind her counter and panting from lack of breath,
the rickety clerk with his wife and brat in tow, the laborer carrying his
youngster astride his neck, the bewildered provincial with his foolish,
dazed expression, the groom, barely shaved and still spreading the
perfume of the stable. And the foreigners dressed like monkeys, English
women like giraffes, the water-carrier, cleaned up for the occasion, and
the innumerable phalanx of little bourgeois, inoffensive little people,
amused at everything. All this crowding and pressing, the sweat and dust,
and the turmoil, all these eddies of human flesh, trampling of corns
beneath the feet of your neighbors, this city all topsy-turvy, these vile
odors, these frantic efforts toward nothing, the breath of millions of
people, all redolent of garlic, give to Monsieur Patissot all the joy
which it is possible for his heart to hold.

After reading the proclamation of the mayor on the walls of his district
he had made his preparations.

This bit of prose said:

I wish to call your attention particularly to the part of
individuals in this celebration. Decorate your homes, illuminate
your windows. Get together, open up a subscription in order to give
to your houses and to your street a more brilliant and more artistic
appearance than the neighboring houses and streets.

Then Monsieur Patissot tried to imagine how he could give to his home an
artistic appearance.

One serious obstacle stood in the way. His only window looked out on a
courtyard, a narrow, dark shaft, where only the rats could have seen his
three Japanese lanterns.

He needed a public opening. He found it. On the first floor of his house
lived a rich man, a nobleman and