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A few military scattered about in those boxes, or even a few sporting bishops in shovel-hats and aprons, would have done much to relieve them from the reproach I have been heaping upon them. Our women, indeed, poor things, always do their duty in personal splendor, and it is not of a poverty in their modes at the Horse Show that I am complaining.
Scattered through this country are mighty works of VAUBAN, whom you know about, and regiments of such corporals as you heard of once upon a time, and many a blue-eyed Bebelle. Through these flat districts, in the shining summer days, walk those long, grotesque files of young novices in enormous shovel-hats, whom you remember blackening the ground checkered by the avenues of leafy trees.
I have never visited Parson's Green, or seen either the Green or the Parson, but surely the pale-green shovel-hats I have designed must be more or less in the spirit. I must work in the dark and let my instincts guide me. The great love I bear to my people will certainly save me from distressing their noble spirit or violating their great traditions."
Along the Rue Catinat in the evenings saunters a picturesque and colorful procession haggard, slovenly officers of the troupes coloniales and of the Foreign Legion, the rows of parti-colored ribbons on their breasts telling of service in little wars in the world's forgotten corners; dreary, white-faced Government employees, their cheeks gaunt from fever, their eyes bloodshot from heavy drinking; sun-bronzed, swaggering, loud-voiced rubber planters in riding breeches and double Terais, down from their plantations in the far interior for a periodic spree; women gowned in the height of Paris fashion, but with too pink cheeks and too red lips and too ready smiles for strangers, equally at home on the Bund of Shanghai or the boulevards of Paris; shaven-headed Hindu money-lenders from British India, the lengths of cotton sheeting which form their only garments revealing bodies as hairy and repulsive as those of apes; barefooted Annamite tirailleurs in uniforms of faded khaki, their great round hats of woven straw tipped with brass spikes like those on German helmets; slender Chinese women, tripping by on tiny, thick-soled shoes in pajama-like coats and trousers of clinging, sleazy silk; naked pousse-pousse coolies, streaming with sweat, graceful as the bronzes in a museum; friars of the religious orders in shovel-hats and linen robes; sailors of the fleet and of the merchant vessels in the harbor, swaggering along with the roll of the sea in their gait; Armenian peddlers with piles of rugs and embroideries slung across their shoulders; Arabs, Indians, Malays, Cambodians, Laos, Siamese, Burmese, Chinese, world without end, Amen.
She had learnt that deans are rather grand people almost as much so as admirals; that they wear shovel-hats to distinguish them from the common ruck of rectors; that they lived in fine houses in a cathedral close; and that they drive in a victoria with a coachman in livery.
A few military scattered about in those boxes, or even a few sporting bishops in shovel-hats and aprons, would have done much to relieve them from the reproach I have been heaping upon them. Our women, indeed, poor things, always do their duty in personal splendor, and it is not of a poverty in their modes at the Horse Show that I am complaining.
But this was a fact the enemy could not follow him long with a literary fusillade they hadn't the mental ammunition. Well has Voltaire been called "the father of all those who wear shovel-hats." A few months in the Bastile, and Voltaire's indeterminate sentence was commuted to exile. He was allowed to leave his country for his country's good.
For what end were their tithes levied and eaten; for what were their shovel-hats scooped out, and their surplices and cassock-aprons girt on; and such a church-repairing, and chaffering, and organing, and other racketing, held over that spot of God's Earth, if Man were but a Patent Digester, and the Belly with its adjuncts the grand Reality?
I had parted from the small bird at somewhere about four o'clock in the morning, when he had got out at Arras, and had been received by two shovel-hats in waiting at the station, who presented an appropriately ornithological and crow-like appearance.
On reading the smooth, florid and plausible sophistry of Wilberforce, Ingersoll once said: "Be easy on Soapy Sam! A few years ago, a little shifting of base on the part of my ancestors, and I would probably have had Soapy Sam's job." This resemblance of opposites makes a person think of that remark applied to Voltaire. "He was the father of all those who wear shovel-hats."
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