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At the small tables sat bony, close-cropped men of a peculiar rubicund type, having dinner with some girl or other from the neighborhood. They were acrobats, clowns, and wrestlers, people of a homogeneous type, dressed in loud checks, with enormous cuffs and boots with almost armor-plated toes.
As for Porthos, he had supped very agreeably off a roast leg of mutton, two pheasants, and a perfect heap of cray-fish; he then directed his body to be anointed with perfumed oils, in the manner of the wrestlers of old; and when this anointment was completed, he had himself wrapped in flannels and placed in a warm bed. Aramis, as we have already said, had not retired.
But when, in his seventeenth year, he was thrown out again on the streets of Paris, he unhappily found there his prison comrades, all great scamps, exercising their dirty professions: teaching dogs to catch rats in the the sewers, and blacking shoes on ball nights in the passage of the Opera amateur wrestlers, who permitted themselves to be thrown by the Hercules of the booths or fishing at noontime from rafts; all of these occupations he followed to some extent, and, some months after he came out of the house of correction, he was arrested again for a petty theft a pair of old shoes prigged from a shop-window.
In our cities, according to our customs, the virgin destined by nature for the open air, made to run in the sunlight; to admire the nude wrestlers, as in Lacedemonia, to choose and to love, is shut up in close confinement and bolted in.
The contests were not confined to the effusions of the poetical muse. Sometimes it was a strife between two lute-players, sometimes guitarists would engage, and sometimes mere wrestlers. The rivalry was so keen that the adverse parties finished up with a general fight. So the Papal Government had forbidden the meetings on the old bridge.
I found that the old Wrestlers seldom entered the Ring, till some one was grown formidable by having thrown two or three of his Opponents; but kept themselves as it were in a reserved Body to defend the Hat, which is always hung up by the Person who gets it in one of the most Conspicuous Parts of the House, and looked upon by the whole Family as something redounding much more to their Honour than a Coat of Arms.
Reverently he gazes upon the priceless bibelots within: the mother-of-pearl fan, half open; the tiny cup and saucer of Sevres on their brass easel; the miniature Cupid and Psyche in marble; the Japanese wrestlers carved in ivory; the ballet-dancer in bisque; the coral necklace; the souvenir spoon from the Paris Exposition; the jade bracelet; and the silver snuff-box that grandfather carried to the day of his death.
Rom'ulus, therefore, proclaimed a feast, in honour of Neptune, throughout all the neighbouring villages, and made the most magnificent preparations for celebrating it. These feasts were generally preceded by sacrifices, and ended in shows of wrestlers, gladiators, and chariot-courses.
And it is as though inventors had sat up at nights puzzling their brains how best to make revellers seasick while keeping them equidistant from a steam-orchestra.... Then the crowd solidly lurches, and you find yourself up against a dentist, or a firm of wrestlers, or a roundabout, or an ice-cream refectory, and you take what comes. You have begun to 'do' the Wakes.
In our cities, according to our customs, the virgin destined by nature for the open air, made to run in the sunlight; to admire the nude wrestlers, as in Lacedemonia, to choose and to love, is shut up in close confinement and bolted in.
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