promenoirs

Updated: May 17, 2025

Shaw, in his comparatively mild-mannered preface to "The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet," recognizes the Puritan hostility to the theatre, but, somewhat perversely, ascribes it to the fact that the promenoirs have always been used as show-windows by the courtesans of each generation. I suspect, however, that that hostility was more deeply rooted.

- Nonsenseorship

But for a long time it was impossible to recapture the old spirit of these haunts, especially in the music-halls, where ghosts passed in the darkness of deserted promenoirs, and where a chill gave one goose- flesh in the empty stalls, Paris was half ashamed to go to the Folies Bergeres or the Renaissance, while away la-bas men were lying on the battlefields or crouching in the trenches.

Philip Gibbs - The Soul of the War