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Updated: May 11, 2025
The crowd streamed through the park-gate into the village, where hundreds of competitors shouted "Paris, Paris;" and their swarms of diligences, cabriolets, and curtained carts, were soon freighted. One of these charioteers engaged to convey me to Paris for half a franc, in a large, covered cart, with oil-skin curtains to protect the passengers in front.
When the horses were in the stable there was a double line of rustic conveyances along the road: carts, cabriolets, tilburies, wagonettes, traps of every shape and age, tipping forward on their shafts or else tipping backward with the shafts up in the air. The carpenter's house was as busy as a bee-hive.
I stood on the Boulevard Poissonniere, where I had just taken my luncheon, and was gazing with an artist's eye upon the dramatic scene spread out before me. Men with bare arms and women panting with excitement were tearing up the pavements or felling trees. An omnibus had just been upset; the rioters added cabriolets, furniture, and casks to it; everything became means of defence.
From Ghent we travelled in two cabriolets to Brussels, which were not quite so easy or pleasant as the Canal boats; but the accommodations as far as Brussels have been really superbe.
Then there were ambulance vehicles, landaus, cabriolets, brakes, and little donkey carts, all entangled together, with their drivers shouting, swearing, and cracking their whips the tumult being apparently increased by the obscurity in which the lanterns set brilliant patches of light. Rain had fallen heavily a few hours previously.
There would also be gas lamps of real glass, which could be broken at a comparatively small expense per dozen, and a broad and handsome foot pavement for gentlemen to drive their cabriolets upon when they were humorously disposed for the full enjoyment of which feat live pedestrians would be procured from the workhouse at a very small charge per head.
An Eastbourne meditative man returning to where he stays, with his daily ounce of tobacco already afire, sees in the streets what are called by the natives "cherry-bangs," crowded with people, and, further, cabriolets and such vehicles holding parties and families. The good folks are driving away from the sea for the better part of the day, going to Battle and other places inland.
Coaches still ran; men wore stocks, shaved their upper lips, ate oysters out of barrels; 'tigers' swung behind cabriolets; women said, 'La! and owned no property; there were manners in the land, and pigsties for the poor; unhappy devils were hanged for little crimes, and Dickens had but just begun to write.
Travelers now arrive from all quarters, in cabriolets, in calashers, in the shabby "vettura," and in the elegant private carriage drawn by post-horses, and driven by postillions in the tightest possible deer-skin breeches, the smallest red coats, and the hugest jack-boots.
"But why should he name it Saint-Ramon?" Again he seemed buried in sad reflections, until aroused from his reverie by his companion's voice. "How singular, after all," the man was saying. "A rich marquis should know only people with equipages; and yet, outside of two or three good carriages, the whole procession consists of fiacres and cabriolets." "Singular, indeed," repeated the old man.
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