Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 11, 2025
At Jourdain's the great room was filled with eaters, just as the vast court was filled with vehicles of every sort wagons, gigs, chars-a-bancs, tilburies, innumerable vehicles which have no name, yellow with mud, misshapen, pieced together, raising their shafts to heaven like two arms, or it may be with their nose on the ground and their rear in the air.
The speciality in the form of entertainment at Chateau d'Eu was drives in the sociable chars-a-bancs in the neighbouring forest, ending in dejeuners and fetes-champetres, which the Queen enjoyed heartily, both because they were novel to her and because they were spontaneous and untrammelled. "So pretty, so merry, so rural," she declared. "Like the fetes in Germany," Prince Albert said.
The chars-a-bancs and the carriages of their Majesties were drawn up on the garden side of the terrace. The Emperor took Prince Metternich in his dog-cart; the Empress drove herself in her English phaeton, accompanied by the Duchess de Fernan Nunez. The rest of us were provided with big chars- a-bancs, each holding six or eight people, and had four horses ridden by two postilions.
The everlasting stream of carts and horses stretched away as far as the Rue de Rivoli and the Place de l'Hotel de Ville. Huge vans were carrying away supplies for all the greengrocers and fruiterers of an entire district; chars-a-bancs were starting for the suburbs with straining, groaning sides. In the Rue de Pont Neuf Florent got completely bewildered.
He was with a party of Labour delegates who had been met by two officers and carried off in chars-a-bancs. Hamilton reported from inquiries among his friends that this kind of visitor came weekly. I thought it a very sensible notion on the Government's part, but I wondered how Gresson had been selected. I had hoped that Macgillivray had weeks ago made a long arm and quodded him.
At Jourdain's the great room was filled with eaters, just as the vast court was filled with vehicles of every sort wagons, gigs, chars-a-bancs, tilburies, innumerable vehicles which have no name, yellow with mud, misshapen, pieced together, raising their shafts to heaven like two arms, or it may be with their nose, on the ground and their rear in the air.
There was a coachman on the box, with three footmen behind, and there was "a motley crowd of outriders on wretched horses and dressed in different liveries." The other chars-a-bancs with six horses followed, and the whole took their, way to the Chateau, a quaint and pleasant dwelling, some of it as old as the time of the Great Mademoiselle.
The Queen was to land by crossing the deck of a vessel moored along the quay and mounting a ladder, the steps of which were covered with crimson velvet. At five o'clock in the afternoon the King and his whole family, a great cortege, arrived on horseback and in open chars-a-bancs. Prince Joinville had met the yacht at Cherbourg and gone on board.
I gave a lingering look at the lovely rooms I was leaving, which were now devoid of our trunks and little personal trinkets, nodded a farewell to our particular valet, who was probably thinking already of our successors, descended l'Escalier d'honneur, and passed through the beautiful Galerie des Gardes to the colonnades, where the chars-a-bancs were ready waiting to carry us to the station.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking