l turn having deigned to adjust
their parallelism, or to see to it that they did not make too unusual
angles. Upon these tables gleamed several dripping pots of wine and
beer, and round these pots were grouped many bacchic visages, purple
with the fire and the wine. There was a man with a huge belly and a
jovial face, noisily kissing a woman of the town, thickset and brawny.
There was a sort of sham soldier, a "naquois," as the slang expression
runs, who was whistling as he undid the bandages from his fictitious
wound, and removing the numbness from his sound and vigorous knee, which
had been swathed since morning in a thousand ligatures. On the other
hand, there was a wretched fellow, preparing with celandine and beef's
blood, his "leg of God," for the next day. Two tables further on, a
palmer, with his pilgrim's costume complete, was practising the lament
of the Holy Queen, not forgetting the drone and the nasal drawl. Further
on, a young scamp was taking a lesson in epilepsy from an old pretender,
who was instructing him in the art of foaming at the mouth, by chewing a
morsel of soap. Beside him, a man with the dropsy was getting rid of his
swelling, and making four or five female thieves, who were disputing
at the same table, over a child who had been stolen that evening, hold
their noses. All circumstances which, two centuries later, "seemed so
ridiculous to the court," as Sauval says, "that they served as a pastime
to the king, and as an introduction to the royal ballet of Night,
divided into four parts and danced on the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon."
"Never," adds an eye witness of 1653, "have the sudden metamorphoses of
the Court of Miracles been more happily presented. Benserade prepared us
for it by some very gallant verses."

Loud laughter everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one held his own
course, carping and swearing, without listening to his neighbor. Pots
clinked, and quarrels sprang up at the shock of the pots, and the broken
pots made rents in the rags.

A big dog, seated on his tail, gazed at the fire. Some children were
mingled in this orgy. The stolen child wept and cried. Another, a big
boy four years of age, seated with legs dangling, upon a bench that was
too high for him, before a table that reached to his chin, and uttering
not a word. A third, gravely spreading out upon the table with his
finger, the melted tallow which dripped from a candle. Last of all, a
little fellow crouching in the mud,