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Updated: May 21, 2025
This is true, if you chance to visit, as did the Harris party, some characteristic phases of Parisian life. Near the east end of the Champs-Elysées, under the gas light and beneath the trees, they found open-air theaters, concerts, crowded cafes, and pretty booths supplied with sweets and drinks.
There were some large booths with tables placed the whole length, at which sat men and women drinking and smoking pipes; orange-girls, a great many, selling the worst possible oranges, which had evidently been boiled to give them a show of freshness.
Booths had been erected in the market place, where cakes and mead were offered for sale, steaks basted, and pancakes tossed in large pans. The biographies of the robbers, printed on coarse paper with red frontispieces, were also hawked about.
From all the lanes between the booths the people were looking in terror, ready for a rush on the beast's least movement, shrieking calls to someone to save the boy, fetch a gun, bring the keeper, &c. That moment, with the great thick carriage-rug on his arm, Harold darted forward, knocking down a gun which some foolish person had brought from a shooting-gallery, and shouting, "Don't!
There were beds of gay geraniums at each corner of the square, and large trees made a pleasant shade where people could sit and watch the crowds, or listen to music, if the band were playing. Pedro and Pancho went straight across the street to the market side. There were rows of small booths there, and already many of them were occupied by people who had things to sell.
McNeill gave it to a blue soldier, who called a corporal, who read it by a swinging lantern. "Very good. Pass, Lieutenant McNeill." The two rode on. To left and right were lighted streets of tents, varied here and there by substantial cabins. Commissary quarters appeared, sutlers' shops, booths, places of entertainment, guardhouses, a chapel.
Scatcherd says that less than a century ago a large fair was held between Huddersfield and Leeds, in a field still called Fairstead, near Birstal, which used to be a great mart for fruit, onions, and such like; and that the clothiers resorted thither from all the country round to purchase the articles, which were stowed away in barns, and sold at booths by lamplight in the morning.* Even Dartmoor had its fair, on the site of an ancient British village or temple near Merivale Bridge, testifying to its great antiquity; for it is surprising how an ancient fair lingers about the place on which it has been accustomed to be held, long after the necessity for it has ceased.
Toys everywhere, original with an attractive ugliness, nine-tenths of them made of earthenware dashed with a kind of bright and harmless paint of which every Roman child remembers the taste for life; and old and young and middle-aged all blow their whistles and horns with solemnly ridiculous pertinacity, pausing only to make some little purchase at the booths, or to exchange a greeting with passing friends, followed by an especially vigorous burst of noise as the whistles are brought close to each other's ears, and the party that can make the more atrocious din drives the other half deafened from the field.
Rollo and Carlos looked out and saw the bridges, and the parapet wall which formed the river side of the street, with the book stalls, and picture stalls, and cake and fruit booths which had been established along the side of it, and the monstrous bathing houses which lay floating on the water below, all gayly painted and adorned with flags and little parterres of flowers; and the washing houses, with their long rows of windows, down close to the water, all filled with women, who were washing clothes by alternately plunging them in the water of the river and then banging them with clubs.
These we ate in courses, as we perched on soap-boxes and other unconventional seats, surrounded by smoked fish, casks of salted cucumbers, festoons of dried mushrooms, "cartwheels" of sour black bread, and other favorite edibles, in the open-fronted booths. A delicious banquet it was, one of those which recur to the memory unbidden when more elaborate meals have been forgotten.
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