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The generals and their staffs were on horseback, the Ministers in carriages, which were somewhat remarkable, as they were almost the only private carriages then in Paris, for hackney-coaches had been hired to convey the Council of State, and no trouble had been taken to alter them, except by pasting over the number a piece of paper of the same colour as the body of the vehicle.
The quiet of the place was seldom disturbed, except by the grocer and butcher, who came to receive orders, or by the cabs, hackney-coaches, and Bath-chairs, in which the ladies took an infrequent airing, or the livery-steed which the retired captain sometimes bestrode for a morning ride, or by the red-coated postman who went his rounds twice a day to deliver letters, and again in the evening, ringing a hand-bell, to take letters for the mail.
I thought they could not be going far, as crowds seldom go far, especially at such a rate; so I walked on more lustily than before, passing group after group of the crowd, and almost vying in speed with some of the carriages, especially the hackney-coaches; and, by dint of walking at this rate, the terraces and houses becoming somewhat less frequent as I advanced, I reached in about three-quarters of an hour a kind of low dingy town, in the neighbourhood of the river; the streets were swarming with people, and I concluded, from the number of wild-beast shows, caravans, gingerbread stalls, and the like, that a fair was being held.
After some brief parley between them in which it was charming to hear how my friend Samuel WOULD speak, what he called French, to a lady who could not understand one syllable of his jargon the mutual hackney-coaches drew up; Madame la Baronne waved to the Captain a graceful French curtsy. "Adyou!" said Samuel, and waved his lily hand. "Adyou-addimang."
He asked himself whether this Ida might not be some poor relation of Madame Jules, and that strange rendezvous, which he had witnessed by chance, the mere necessity of a charitable effort. But could that old pauper have seduced this Ida? There was something impossible in the very idea. All waiting hackney-coaches now had an interest for him.
I thought they could not be going far, as crowds seldom go far, especially at such a rate; so I walked on more lustily than before, passing group after group of the crowd, and almost vying in speed with some of the carriages, especially the hackney-coaches; and, by dint of walking at this rate, the terraces and houses becoming somewhat less frequent as I advanced, I reached in about three-quarters of an hour a kind of low dingy town, in the neighbourhood of the river; the streets were swarming with people, and I concluded, from the number of wild-beast shows, caravans, gingerbread stalls, and the like, that a fair was being held.
Sign-boards creaked and swung to every puff of wind. Great hackney-coaches, sunk at the waist like those old gallipot boats of ours, went ploughing past through the mud of mid-road, with bepowdered footmen clinging behind and saucy coachmen perched in front.
The quiet of the place was seldom disturbed, except by the grocer and butcher, who came to receive orders, or the cabs, hackney-coaches, and Bath-chairs, in which the ladies took an infrequent airing, or the livery-steed which the retired captain sometimes bestrode for a morning ride, or by the red-coated postman who went his rounds twice a day to deliver letters, and again in the evening, ringing a hand-bell, to take letters for the mail.
His cabriolet was gorgeously painted—a bright red; and wherever we went, City or West End, Paddington or Holloway, North, East, West, or South, there was the red cab, bumping up against the posts at the street corners, and turning in and out, among hackney-coaches, and drays, and carts, and waggons, and omnibuses, and contriving by some strange means or other, to get out of places which no other vehicle but the red cab could ever by any possibility have contrived to get into at all.
She dreamed of numbers, had favourite incantations by which to conjure them: noted the figures made by peels of peaches and so forth, the numbers of houses, on hackney-coaches was superstitious comme toutes les rimes poetiques. She commonly brought a beautiful agate bonbonniere full of gold pieces, when she played.
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