Little Poems in Prose

howled; it was a confluence of cries, opposing detonations, and sharp explosions; the ‘Merry Devils’ and the clowns twisted up the features of their weathered faces, hardened by the wind, the rain and the sun. They flung forth, with the confidence of trained comedians, witty sayings and jests as solidly and heavily comic as those of Molière. The strong men, proud of the size of their limbs, without either forehead or cranium, like orang-outangs, were strutting majestically beneath the tights which they have washed on the previous evening for the grand occasion. The dancing girls, beautiful as fairies or princesses, leaped and skipped under the lanterns whose flame crowds their petti- coats with spangles. All was light, dust, cries, joy, tumult. One set was spending money, an- other making it; both equally happy. The chil- dren clung to their mothers’ skirts, begging for sugar-sticks, or climbing on to their fathers’ shoulders so as to get a better view of some juggler who seemed as dazzling as a god, and everywhere, dominating every other scent, was wafted an odour of frying, which was as it were the incense of this holy festival. At the extreme end of the range of booths, as if, ashamed of himself, he had pronounced his own exile from all these splendours, I saw a poor mountebank, with bowed back, infirm,