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Updated: July 17, 2025
On a Sunday morning in early June, just before the church bells begin to ring, there is wont to be held the annual general parade and inspection of the Corps of Commissionaires, on the enclosed grass plot by the margin of the ornamental water in St. James's Park.
The formidable process of loading the diligence was not yet completed. There was a perfect Mont Blanc of luggage to transfer from the courtyard to the top of the diligence, not in a hurry, but calmly and deliberately. The articles were to be selected one by one, and put upon the top, and taken down again, and laid in the courtyard, and put up a second time, and perhaps a third time; and after repeated attempts and failures, and a reasonable amount of vociferation and emphatic ejaculations on the part of postilions and commissionaires, the thing was to be declared completed, and finally roped down, and the great leathern cover drawn over all. Still the process would be got through before the hour of table d'hote at the Albergo de Reale. I must needs therefore dine at a restaurant. I betook me to one of these establishments hard by the diligence office, and took my place at a small table, with its white napery, small bottle of wine, and roll of Lombardy bread, in the same room with some thirty or so of the merchants and citizens of Milan. I intimated my wish to dine
Gentle clouds of incense come wafting through the vast edifice; and in the lulls of the music you hear the faint chant of the priest, and the silver tinkle of the bell. Six Englishmen, with the commissionaires, and the "Murray's Guide-books" in their hands, are looking at the "Descent from the Cross." Of this picture the "Guide-book" gives you orders how to judge.
He lit a cigarette, and thought of Seven Sachs gazing at the name of Seven Sachs in fire on the façade of a Broadway Theatre in New York. Was not this London phenomenon at least as fine? He considered it was. The Regent Theatre existed there it stood! Its entrance-lamps bathed the pavement in light, and in this radiance stood the commissionaires in their military pride and their new uniforms.
Denis, too, were always muddy, be the weather what it might; and the gutters were always full of stagnant pools. An ever-changing, never-failing stream of rustics from the country, workpeople from the factories of the banlieu, grisettes, commercial travellers, porters, commissionaires, and gamins of all ages here flowed to and fro.
"My dear sir, there are Commissionaires at all the hotels who are perfect linguists," said Mr. Firkin in a gentlemanly manner. "Oh! dear me!" said Mr. P. wiping his forehead with the red bandanna that he always carries, despite Mrs. P., "what is a commissionaire?" "An interpreter, a cicerone," said Mr. Firkin. "A guide, philosopher, and friend," said Kurz Pacha.
So pretty, and so sensible!" She disappeared round the corner before he could compose a suitable husband's reply to this laudation of a wife. Then the commissionaires at the entrance seemed to start into life. And then suddenly several preoccupied men strode rapidly out of the theatre, buttoning their coats, and vanished phantom-like.... Critics, on their way to destruction!
You could stroll across twenty feet of private tessellated pavement, enter jewelled portals with the assistance of jewelled commissionaires, traverse furlong after furlong of vistas where nought but man was vile, sojourn by the way in the concert-hall, the reading-room, or the picture-gallery, smoke a cigarette in the court of fountains, write a letter in the lounge, and finally ask to be directed to the stationery department, where seated on a specially designed chair and surrounded by the most precious manifestations of applied art, you could select a threepenny box of J pens, and have it sent home in a pair-horse van.
He watched the thin stream of people who left before the play was over, suburbanites mostly, in a hurry for their trains. Very soon the whole audience followed, commissionaires were busy with their whistles, the servants eagerly looking right and left for their masters. And then Elizabeth!
A brisk little gentleman, who had made the journey in the same coach with Pogson, but had more modestly taken a seat in the Imperial, here passed us, and greeted me with a "How d'ye do?" He had shouldered his own little valise, and was trudging off, scattering a cloud of commissionaires, who would fain have spared him the trouble. "Do you know that chap?" says Pogson; "surly fellow, ain't he?"
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