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"Ah," interrupted Morcerf, laughing, "Beauchamp, Beauchamp, keep that for the Corsaire or the Charivari, but spare my future father-in-law before me." Then, turning to Monte Cristo, "You just now spoke his name as if you knew the baron?"
The harsh details of day are lost in a luminous glow of mystic charm. Jim had just ridden past Billie when the silence was shattered by a sudden fury of sound. The popping of revolvers, the clanging of cow bells, the clash of tin boilers all that medley of discord which lends volume to the horror known as a charivari tore to shreds the harmony of the night. "What's that?" called Billie.
In the tavern or the barber's-shop, all secrets passed into every ear. From newspapers how little can be culled! Manifestations are there made manifest to us and we are taught, with tedious iteration, the things we knew, and need not have known, before. In my research, I have had only such poor guides as Punch, or the London Charivari and The Queen, the Lady's Newspaper.
The view which Lady Montfort took of these matters was very different from that of Lady Roehampton. Lady Montfort was in her riding habit, leaning back in an easy chair, with her whip in one hand and the "Charivari" in the other, and she said, "Are you not going to ride to-day, Endymion?" "I think not. I wanted to talk to you a little about my plans, Lady Montfort." "Your plans?
The air was in anguish with the din of tree-felling and log-chopping, of stamping, neighing, braying, whooping, guffawing, and singing all the daybreak charivari beloved of a camp of Confederate "critter companies."
He pronounced Jasmin to be a Gascon Beranger, and quoted several of his lines from the Charivari, but apologised for their translation into French, fearing that they might lose much of their rustic artlessness and soft harmony. What was a still greater honour, Jasmin was reviewed by the first critic of France Sainte-Beuve in the leading critical journal, the Revue des deux Mondes.
A Charivari was, however, going on in front of a neighbour's door, as a nuptial serenade on the occasion of some unsuitable marriage; when the clamour of horns and kettles, marrow-bones and cleavers, saluted the mother's ears, accompanied by thirty burlesque verses, the composition of the father of the child who had just been born. Jacques Jasmin was only one child amongst many.
The populace assembled in the evening of the day on which the banns had been first proclaimed, and saluted the happy pair in their respective houses with a Charivari.
I know that some disdainful prig will assure me that it is but a corruption of the French "charivari," and so it is; but then "charivari" is a corruption of the low Latin "charivarium" and that is a corruption of something else, and, indeed, almost every word is a corruption of some other word.
But it was passed round among the boys and made its laugh, helping of course to undermine the master's authority, as "Punch" or the "Charivari" takes the dignity out of an obnoxious minister. One morning, on going to the schoolroom, Master Langdon found an enlarged copy of this sketch, with its label, pinned on the door.
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