escence of Luxury has
come out: for men have wealth; nay new-got wealth; and under the Terror
you durst not dance except in rags. Among the innumerable kinds of
Balls, let the hasty reader mark only this single one: the kind they
call Victim Balls, Bals a 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
light-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 experience 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 eclipse, revolving on
herself, as by a double effect of gravitation and attraction.' (Mercier,
Nouveau Paris, iii. 138, 153.) 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. (Montgaillard, iv. 436-42.) 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 carre or spencer with rectangular tail
appended to it; 'square-tailed coat,' with elegant antiguillotinish
specialty of collar; 'the hair plaited at the temples,' and knotted
back, long-flowing, in military wise: young men of what they call the
Muscadin or Dandy species! Freron, in