That the Balls, therefore, have a new figure this winter, we can see. Not Carmagnoles, rude 'whirlblasts of rags,' as Mercier called them 'precursors of storm and destruction:' no, soft Ionic motions; fit for the light sandal, and antique Grecian tunic! Efflorescence 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 his fondness names them Jeunesse doree, Golden, or Gilt Youth. They have come out, these Gilt Youths, in a kind of resuscitated state; they wear crape round the left arm, such of them as were Victims. More they carry clubs loaded with lead; in an angry manner: any Tappe-dur or remnant of Jacobinism they may fall in with, shall fare the worse. They have suffered much: their friends guillotined; their pleasures, frolics, superfine collars ruthlessly repressed: 'ware now the base Red Nightcaps who did it! Fair Cabarus and the Army of Greek sandals smile approval. In the Theatre Feydeau, young Valour in square-tailed coat eyes Beauty in Greek sandals, and kindles by her glances: Down with Jacobinism! No Jacobin hymn or demonstration, only Thermidorian ones, shall be permitted here: we beat down Jacobinism with clubs loaded with lead.
But let any one who has examined the Dandy nature, how petulant it is, especially in the gregarious state, think what an element, in sacred right of insurrection, this Gilt Youth was! Broils and battery; war without truce or measure! Hateful is Sansculottism, as Death and Night. For indeed is not the Dandy culottic, habilatory, by law of existence; 'a cloth-animal: one that lives, moves, and has his being in cloth?'--So goes it, waltzing, bickering; fair Cabarus, by Orphic witchery, struggling to recivilise mankind. Not unsuccessfully, we hear. What utmost Republican grimness can resist Greek sandals, in Ionic motion, the very toes covered with gold rings? (Ibid. Mercier (ubi supra).) By degrees the indisputablest new-politeness rises; grows, with vigour. And yet, whether, even to this day, that inexpressible tone of society known under the old Kings, when Sin had 'lost all its deformity' (with or without advantage to us), and airy Nothing had obtained such a local habitation and establishment as she never had,--be recovered? Or even, whether it be not lost beyond recovery? (De Stael, Considerations iii. c. 10, &c.)--Either way, the world must contrive to struggle on.