How Paris Amuses Itself

by F. Berkeley Smith

MARDI GRAS ON THE BOULEVARD DES ITALIENS

All Paris poured into the Grands Boulevards on Mardi Gras. From the Madeleine to the Place de la Bastille, this broad thoroughfare was a compact surging sea of human beings. Those who had space enough danced, some as clowns, some as harlequins. There were women in doublets and hose, in boys’ clothes, in every conceivable get-up that could be dragged from the boxes of cheap costumers. This human sea laughed at each other in the best of good nature and threw paper confetti tit for tat all day and half the night. Paris seemed to have been visited by a vari-colored blizzard that roared whirling by, a February wind, over the heads of the sea of merry-makers. It piled itself in great kaleidoscopic drifts in the gutters and got down thousands of people’s necks. The air was filled with dust, and from the balconies shot long streamers of paper ribbons, some caught in the trees below, others fell entangling themselves round the chapeaux of the passing crowd.

At certain points the busses crossed amid cheers, but otherwise no vehicles were allowed on the boulevards. A rabbit would have had hard work getting through in a hurry from the Madeleine to the Bastille, so compact was the crowd. In all this fun and gaiety I did not see a fight or a drunken man, and I observed the show as long as it lasted. It began on Sunday, when a procession of students started from the Sorbonne and marched across the Seine, a somewhat disappointing cavalcade in length but which, nevertheless, half of Paris turned out to see and applaud.

The carnival reached its height on Tuesday and in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

There were bal masqués galore, for nearly every one had dressed for them in the morning.

At the Bullier, the Gay Tivoli, and the Moulin de la Galette, carnival reigned supreme.

At the Bal Bullier one had to take more than a passing glance to tell the boys from the girls, for the Mimis and Fantines had often tucked up their hair and donned sailors’ clothes or a Tuxedo. Others went in scantier attire and were more distinguishable. There were feminine Méphistos, Spanish dancers, little brunettes as bullfighters, and blondes as Oriental favorites of the harem. When the ball was over, this motley crowd romped down to supper along the “Boul Mich” in their fantastic clothes, and had Marennes vertes and cold champagne and beer and sandwiches in the hostelries of the Quartier Latin.

But all this was only a slice in the carnival pie, for Montmartre was a bedlam, and the boulevards were still packed and as jolly as they had been when I crossed that thoroughfare on the top of a bus and saw a surging sea of color. Such screaming and cheering I have never seen elsewhere.

Clowns were everywhere, acrobats did flip-flaps from the sand bins along the route of the Metropolitan, street bands blared away from the terrasses of the cafés, sidewalk venders did a thriving trade in confetti, sold in paper bags, which were warranted to hold a true kilo. Later some of these confetti hawkers began replenishing their stock from the sidewalk where it could literally be gathered by the shovelful.