United States or Burundi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The circus was pitched in a disgruntled field somewhere near the dismally remote railway station. The tent was crowded with the good inhabitants of Clermont-Ferrand who, since they could not buy sugar or matches or coal for cooking, must spend their money somewhere. I scarcely had entered a circus since the good old days of the Cirque Rocambeau. And what a difference!
Whether it was their real name or not, no one in the world which narrowed itself within the limits of the Cirque Rocambeau, could possibly tell. But it was the only name that Andrew had, and as good as any other.
Of his private history I knew nothing, save his beginnings in the Cirque Rocambeau and his identity with a professional mountebank known as Petit Patou. Soon afterwards I spent a week-end with the Verity-Stewarts.
But the Cirque Rocambeau had been the whole of his life, childhood, boyhood, young manhood; he was linked to it by the fibres of a generous nature. All those elderly anxious folk were his family. Many of the children, his contemporaries, trained in the circus, had flown heartlessly from the nest, and the elders had fatalistically lamented.
He had gone about his funny business with the air of a curate marrying his vicar to the object of his hopeless affections. And Coincon had devastatingly insulted him. He wasn't, nom de Dieu, carrying about freaks at a fair. He wanted a comedian and not a giant. No wonder the Cirque Rocambeau had come to grief, if it depended on such canaries as Lackaday.
Its haute ecole was its pride, and it demanded for its premiere equestrienne the homage due to the great artists of the world. Bernhardt of the Comedie Francaise I think she was still there in those far-off days, Patti of the Opera and Mlle Renee Saint-Maur of the Cirque Rocambeau were three stars of equal magnitude. The circus toured through France from year's end to year's end.
There was a green-room, with a wooden, practicable bar running along one end, and a wizened, grizzled, old barman behind it who supplied your wants from the contents of a myriad bottles ranged in perfect order in some obscure nook beneath the counter. They did things in the great manner in the Cirque Rocambeau. It visited none but first-class towns which had open spaces worthy of its magnificence.
It despised one or two night stands. The Cirque Rocambeau had a way of imposing itself upon a town as an illusory permanent institution, a week being its shortest and almost contemptuous sojourn. The Cirque Rocambeau maintained the stateliness of the old world. Now the Cirque Rocambeau fades out of this story almost as soon as it enters it.
Tiens, would you like me to tell you something? All my life I have loved Auguste in a circus. You know Auguste the clown? Well, you reminded me of Auguste and I laughed." "Until lately I was Auguste in the Cirque Rocambeau." She clapped her hands. "But I have seen you there when I was quite little three four years ago at Marseilles."
His manners were marked by shy simplicity and quiet reserve. It was a shock to preconceived ideas to find him bred in a circus, even in so magnificent a circus as the Cirque Rocambeau, and brought up by a clown, even by such a superior clown as Ben Flint, "And my old friend?" I asked. For I had lost knowledge of Ben practically from the time I ended my happy vagabondage. Maxima mea culpa.
Word Of The Day