ABSTRACT
the particulars of the fête need not be described at present, as many hundred English writers have, no doubt, given an account of it, and everybody knows very well that on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, des Cendres, the annual fat ox of the Carnival is made to take sundry walks through Paris, a little chubby butcher’s boy, seated behind his gilded horns, with pink breeches on, in the guise of a Cupid, and a number of grown up butchers and butcherlings habited as Spanish grandees, Turkish ages, Roman senators, and what not, following the animal, and causing the air to resound with a most infernal music of horns and instruments of brass. Triumphal cars, adorned with tinsel and filled with musicians—troops of actors from Franconi’s, mounted on the steeds of that establishment, and decorated in its finest costumes, join in the august ceremonial, and crowds of masks which cover the faces of many idle, merry young people of both sexes, and of an infinite number of blackguards of the capital, wander up and down the Boulevards on foot, on horseback, in carriages, and jingling cabriolets de place, and have done so from time immemorial.
