Strange little dramas of lust and conquest punctuated the cyclonic panorama. Here, a girl’s snapping black eyes, winking devilishly, and pursed-up Cupid mouth invited a new swain to master her. There, a short-skirted beauty, whose sways and kicks revealed bare thighs, was dancing wildly a solo intended to infatuate further two rival admirers. Again, a half-crazed sansculotte had won a girl and in token of triumph was spinning her body horizontally around like a top, upheld by the open palm of his huge right arm.
But what might be this comic figure, quite unpartnered––knocked and shoved from human pillar to human post––winning the deep curses of the dancers, and their hearty wallops when not o’er-busied with Terpsichore?
Picard, the ex-valet of aristocracy, finally let out from the Salpetriere mock-court, had stumbled into this bedlam of sansculotte craziness, the rhythm and procedure of which were as foreign to him as a proposition in Euclid.
But the Jolly Baker, from the Ile de Paris, was his match. The bare-armed, lean-legged pleasurer had equipped himself 117 (by way of disguise) with a large false moustache, and evading the close watch of his hatchet-faced, middle-aged spouse, had come forth to celebrate. Neither dancer nor vocalist, the Jolly Baker had other little entertaining ways all his own.
As the foolscap-crowned, white-and-red-trousered Picard bumped the pave, he saw squatting opposite him a figure whose gleaming eyes, ferocious whiskerage and lean-wiry frame suggested the canine rather than the human species. The Jolly Baker was a bum werewolf, but a “hot dog.”
The gleaming eyes never left Picard’s face, the dog-like body jumped whichever way he did, Picard half expected the dog-man to bite or snap the next instant and take a chunk out of him. Both had got to their feet now; the stranger still silent and nosey, Picard looking out of the corner of his eye for a way of escape. But just then the Baker spied a maenad with a drum.
One could beat drum in celebration, if naught else. Lo and behold, the posterior of the foolscapped one would serve for a drum very nicely! The Jolly Baker twisted 118 Picard around, bending him half double as he did so.
With a rear thrust and firm shoulder grip, the Jolly Baker leaped upon Picard’s back. Emulating the young woman’s beating of the drum, he rained a shower of blows on the valet’s hind quarters.
The new “drum”-beater was now quite the cynosure of admiring attention. He had captured the centre of the stage. He gloried in it. With a more elaborate, fanciful and complexive “rat-tat-tat-rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat––”
He suddenly lost his grip of the “human drum,” Picard wriggled out from under, and the drummer bumped his own posterior on the pave.