[1] It is calculated that there are in Paris 30,000 persons who have no other means of existence but theft.
The crowd entirely choked up the means of circulation, and, in spite of his gigantic strength, the Chourineur was compelled to remain almost motionless in the midst of this compact throng. He was, however, willing to remain so, as the prince would not pass the barrier of Charenton until eleven o'clock, and it was not yet seven; and he had a singular spectacle before him.
In a large, low apartment, occupied at one end by musicians, surrounded by benches and tables laden with the fragments of a repast, broken plates, empty bottles, etc., a dozen men and women, in various disguises and half drunk, were dancing with the utmost excitement that frantic and obscene dance called La Chahut.
Amongst the dissipated revellers who figured in this saturnalia, the Chourineur remarked two couples who obtained the most overwhelming applause, from the revolting grossness of their attitudes, their gesticulations, and their language. The first couple consisted of a man disguised as a bear, and nearly covered with a waistcoat and trousers of black sheepskin. The head of the animal, being too troublesome to carry, had been replaced by a kind of hood with long hair, which entirely covered his features; two holes for his eyes, and a long one for his mouth, allowed him to see, speak, and breathe.
This man—one of the prisoners escaped from La Force (amongst whom were Barbillon and the two murderers arrested at the ogress's at the tapis-franc, at the beginning of this recital)—this man so masked was Nicholas Martial, the son and brother of the two women for whom the scaffold was prepared but a few paces distant.
Induced into this act of atrocious insensibility and infamous audacity by one of his associates, this wretch had dared with this disguise to join in the last revels of the carnival. The woman who danced with him, dressed as a vivandière, wore a round leather cap with ragged ribands, a kind of bodice of threadbare red cloth, ornamented with three rows of brass buttons, a green skirt, and trousers of white calico. Her black hair fell in disorder all about her head, and her haggard and swollen features evinced the utmost effrontery and immodesty. The vis-à-vis of these dancers were no less disgusting.
The man, who was very tall, and disguised as Robert Macaire, had so begrimed his features with soot that it was impossible to recognise him, and, besides, a large bandage covered his left eye; the white of the right eye being thus the more heightened, rendered him still more hideous. The lower part of the Skeleton's countenance (for it was he) disappeared in a high neckcloth made of an old red shawl.
Wearing an old, white, napless hat with a crushed side, dirty, and without a crown, a green coat in rags, and tight mulberry-coloured pantaloons, patched in every direction, and tied around the instep with pieces of packthread, this assassin outraged the most outré and revolting attitudes of the Chahut, darting from right to left, before and behind, his lanky limbs as hard as steel, and twisting and twining, and springing and bounding with such vigour and elasticity, that he seemed set in motion by steel springs.
A worthy coryphée of this filthy saturnalia, his lady partner, a tall and active creature with impudent and flushed features, attired en débardeur, wore a flat cap on one side of a powdered wig with a thick pigtail, a waistcoat and trousers of worn green velvet, adjusted to her shape by an orange scarf, with long ends flowing down her back.
A fat, vulgar, coarse woman, the brutal ogress of the tapis-franc, was seated on one of the benches, holding on her knees the plaid cloaks of this creature and the vivandière, whilst they were rivalling the bounds, and jumps, and gross postures of the Skeleton and Nicholas Martial.