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Updated: July 25, 2025
At a musical soiree, attended by the class of people who at home would have been chatty and sociable, given to making acquaintance and to keeping up acquaintance, the young men harmlessly talking and walking with the young ladies, and the old people listening together, while constant movement and intercourse kept life in the assembly, and there was some real pleasure felt amidst a good deal of unavoidable suffering, I say, I found such a soiree in Venice to be a spectacle of ladies planted in formal rows of low-necks and white dresses around the four sides of one room, and of gentlemen restively imprisoned in dress-coats and white gloves in another.
The Prince made a respectful and graceful bow in response, then the King stooped down and kissed his cheek. I was tremendously interested when the American exhibitors came forward; there were many of them, quite a procession. They looked very distinguished in their simple dress-coats, without any decorations. I was so glad.
Vehicles of all sorts came from neighboring parishes, stopping at the different houses, and tall Norman women dismounted, wearing dark dresses, with kerchiefs crossed over the bosom, fastened with silver brooches a hundred years old. The men had put on their blue smocks over their new frock-coats or over their old dress-coats of green-cloth, the two tails of which hung down below their blouses.
And it was with a sense of absolute crime that I quitted that house and returned home. At home I entered over the carpeted stairs into the ante-room, whose floor was covered with cloth; and having removed my fur coat, I sat down to a dinner of five courses, waited on by two lackeys in dress-coats, white neckties, and white gloves.
When in full dress, gentlemen wore dress-coats with enormous collars and short waists, well-stuffed white cambric cravats, small-clothes, or tight-fitting pantaloons, silk stockings, and pumps. Duels were very common, and a case of dueling pistols was a part of the outfit of the Southern and Western Congressmen, who used to spend more or less time in practicing.
Multitudes seem to have gone to the diggings with every species of encumbrance, and in a totally unsuitable garb. Splendid dress-coats and waistcoats, boots and pantaloons, but no working-clothes, nor implements for camping, and in many instances not even a cloak: everything suitable for the enjoyment of their golden promises, with nothing to assist in realising them.
It struck him that the young men on whose arms they hung, in promenading around the long oval within the crowd of stationary spectators, were very much younger than students used to be, whether they wore the dress-coats of the Seniors or the cut-away of the Juniors and Sophomores; and the young girls themselves did not look so old as he remembered them in his day.
Past midnight, however, some more people arrived, loungers in dress-coats and white ties, who had come from some theatre or soiree and wished to learn the result of the voting before all Paris knew it. Reporters also appeared; and they could be seen darting one by one out of the room as soon as a partial result was communicated to them. Claude, hoarse by now, still went on calling names.
A sense of the past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and the head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to the endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms in the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them.
It was the same scene, the same dress-coats upon the same luminous boards, the same electric rays that fell around him in the hour of his accession, creating the same vulgar aureole. Some firemen crossed the stage slowly and with a wearied expression made their examinations; some water-carriers were sprinkling the parquet, while others were brushing away the dust.
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