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Having added our own paletots and beavers to the general stock, and having each received a little bit of pasteboard in exchange for the same, we were shown into the ball-room by Mademoiselle Annette, who appeared to fill the position of hostess, usher, and general superintendent. It was a good-sized room, somewhat low in the ceiling, and brilliantly lighted with lots of tallow candles in bottles.
They were very pretty little men, with pale faces, and large, melancholy eyes; and they had beautiful little hands, and little boots, and the finest little shirts, and black paletots lined with the richest silk; and they had picture-books in several languages, English, and French, and German, I remember. Two more aristocratic-looking little men I never set eyes on.
"Well! are you coming, my boy?" Lousteau's voice called from the stage. "Jump down." Lucien sprang over. He scarcely recognized Florine and Coralie in their ordinary quilted paletots and cloaks, with their faces hidden by hats and thick black veils. Two butterflies returned to the chrysalis stage could not be more completely transformed. "Will you honor me by giving me your arm?"
The Jew who contracts for making the paletots is no tailor at all. A few years ago he sold sponges in the street, and now he rides in his carriage. The Jew's profits are 500 half-crowns, or L60 odd, per week that is upwards of L3,000 a-year. Women are mostly engaged at the paletot work.
They play at billiards in the morning, they absorb pale ale for breakfast, and 'top up' with glasses of strong waters. They go down to Tattersall's, and swagger in the Park, with their hands plunged in the pockets of their paletots. What strikes me especially in the outward demeanour of sporting youth is their amazing gravity, their conciseness of speech, and careworn and moody air.
So he shrieks benevolently when a drunken soldier is flogged; but he trims his paletots, and adorns his legs, with the flesh of men and the skins of women, with degradation, pestilence, heathendom, and despair; and then chuckles self-complacently over the smallness of his tailors' bills. Hypocrite! straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel!
"Well! are you coming, my boy?" Lousteau's voice called from the stage. "Jump down." Lucien sprang over. He scarcely recognized Florine and Coralie in their ordinary quilted paletots and cloaks, with their faces hidden by hats and thick black veils. Two butterflies returned to the chrysalis stage could not be more completely transformed. "Will you honor me by giving me your arm?"
The fishermen wear overcoats, coarse smooth waistcoats, large paletots, made waterproof by grease or fish-liver oil; leather overalls, stockings, and native shoes. The women attire themselves in jackets and gowns, petticoats and aprons of woollen frieze; over which is thrown a "hempa," or wide black robe, like a Jesuit frock, trimmed with velvet binding.
They passed out of the focus of my observation into their several forms in which they walk through common life. Putting on their opera-cloaks, their paletots, they put on, for me, that mark that hides the inner life, and the veil that conceals all hidden passions. It is said that there is, no longer, romance in real life. But the truth is that we live the romance that former ages told and sang.
If customers should want Kolinski Boas, Kolinski Boas would of course be forthcoming, to any number required; either Kolinski Boas, or quasi Kolinski, which in trade is admitted to be the same thing. When a man advertises that he has 40,000 new paletots, he does not mean that he has got that number packed up in a box.
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