“The hubbub is extreme beyond that of yesterday; and madame is cut from the enjoyment? Supposing, then, I were to take her place as fruitière?”
“That is impossible. What fly has stung you? But you can go yourself, and report to me of the proceedings.”
“Well,” said Ned, “I think I will, that I may learn to differentiate between the emotions of triumph and of pleasure.”
He saw over the trees, as he turned into the gardens, the soft blue dome of the great envelope stretching its creases to the sun—an opaline mound that glistered high and lonely as an untrodden hill summit. But about the show spot itself, when he reached it, he could have thought two-thirds of all Paris collected. In one vast circle—wheel-fely and hub—this enormous hoop of onlookers enclosed the centre of attraction. On its white face-surface upturned, as on the surface of a boiling geyser, bubbles of myriad talk seethed and broke, filling the air with reverberation. Winds of laughter ruffled it; a sun of merriment caught the facets of its countless eyes. It was a wheel of jovial Fortune—of a jewelled triumphal car that had yesterday been a war-chariot, scythed and menacing.
Compact of solid humanity throughout its circumference, its edge was nevertheless frayed, like the exterior of a clustered swarm of bees, into a flitting and buzzing superficies of place-seekers. These—scurrying, criss-crossing; sometimes settling upon and becoming part of the main body; sometimes affecting a cynical indifference to a show, from view of the inner processes of which their position debarred them; in their formless excitement, their hysteric and unmannered hunt for points of vantage, their magnifying of occasion into epoch, their utter lack of the sense of moral proportion, of the sense to distinguish appreciably between affairs of moment and affairs of the moment—exhibited, as the typical traveller exhibits, those national characteristics that seem as little accommodating to revolution in principle as to revolution in habit.
“Only here,” thought Ned, “they are not discreditable exceptions to the national rule, but fair samples of the whole.”
A couple, pausing within ear-shot of him, engaged his attention at the instant. One of these, a lord of clinquant, self-satisfied, arrogant-looking, and dressed, one might have fancied, to the top bent of bourgeoisie, saluted the other, as a skipjack humours in himself a holiday mood of affability, with an air of tolerant condescension.
“Eh, indeed, M. David!” said he. “You profit yourself of this occasion. But, if I were in your position, I should seize it to lie abed.”
The person addressed stood a half minute at acrid gaze—his shoulders humped, and his hands gripped on the ebony crutch of his cane—before he replied. He was a man of a somewhat formidable expression, with red-brown hair all writhed into little curls, as if a certain inner heat had warped it. His eyes were hard as flints; and the natural causticity and determination of his face took yet more sinister emphasis from a permanent distortion of the upper jaw, whereon an accidental blow had caused a swelling that impaired his right speech and made of his very smile a wickedness. His figure, square and firm, if inclined to embonpoint, set off to advantage his suit of dark blue cloth, very plain and neat, with silver buttons; his handkerchief and simple ruffles were spotless, and about the whole man was an appearance of cold self-containment that was full of the conscious pride of intellectual caste.
“My good Reveillon,” he said at length, “yesterday it was decreed that the deputies of the third state should equal in number those of the nobility and of the clergy put together. That was a momentous concession, was it not? Also, the eligibility for election, into the second order, of curés, and into the Tiers Etat of Protestants, was made known—truly all subjects for popular rejoicing. Doubtless, then, your employés, leaning out of the windows of the paper factory in the Rue St Antoine” (“They could not,” thought Ned. “I know the place. Every window is barred.”), “tossed their caps into the street, into the air—anywhere but into your face, crying Vive Necker and A bas les notables!”