United States or Liechtenstein ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In this case too a large sheet of plate- glass was uncovered, and to form an idea of the <i>etalage</i> you must imagine that a jeweller, for reasons of his own, has struck an unnatural partnership with an undertaker. The black mummified corpse of the saint is stretched out in a glass coffin, clad in his mouldering canonicals, mitred, crosiered and gloved, glittering with votive jewels.
Within, the object of hungry curiosity, a fowl, adorned by a placard informing that the price is forty-four francs. Conspicuous in the crowd, his face pressed against the glass of the étalage, a little old gentleman. The bowl of municipal soup and the loaf of bread are all that he has to look forward to as the day's sustenance.
It is this audacity of speculation, I apprehend, this etalage of bold results, rather than any success in their development, which has fixed the public attention.
At that period the city boasted of its Addison of letters since forgotten; its Feu-de-joie, the peerless dancer, whose beauty had fired the Duke Gambade to that extravagant conduct which made the recipient of those marked attentions the talk of the town; its Roscius of the drama; its irresistible ingenue, the lovely, little Fantoccini; and its theatrical carpet-knight, M. Grimacier, whose intrigue with the stately and, heretofore, saintly Madame Etalage had, it was said later, much to do with the unhappy taking-off of that ostentatious and haughty lady.
The eloquent Ambassador concluded by saying that, at the command of his Royal master, it was both his duty and his pleasure to present, and so forth and so forth. Mr. Edison, visibly ill at ease, nevertheless made a suitable reply in the fewest possible words, and the étalage being thus at an end, the noblemen, headed by their Ambassador, slowly retired, myself forming the tail of the procession.
It is not enough to glance at the étalage, one must investigate the shop behind. Let us consider the street that you wish me to describe. As I recall it, first on the right is the establishment of B., the gunsmith. In studying his premises it will, of course, be necessary for me to purchase a rifle or a revolver and a box of cartridges.
Yet it was easy for a man of any experience to read two facts in all this idle etalage; one being, that his finery was but of a second-rate order; the other, that he was a parvenu, not at home even amongst his second-rate splendor. So far there was nothing to distinguish Mr. W 's papers from the papers of other triflers.
Word Of The Day