2300 Les Miserables
quire buffoons. The King has Roquelaure, the populace has
the Merry-Andrew. Paris is a great, mad city on every occa-
sion that it is a great sublime city. There the Carnival forms
part of politics. Paris,—let us confess it—willingly allows
infamy to furnish it with comedy. She only demands of her
masters—when she has masters—one thing: ‘Paint me the
mud.’ Rome was of the same mind. She loved Nero. Nero
was a titanic lighterman.
Chance ordained, as we have just said, that one of these
shapeless clusters of masked men and women, dragged
about on a vast calash, should halt on the left of the bou-
levard, while the wedding train halted on the right. The
carriage-load of masks caught sight of the wedding carriage
containing the bridal party opposite them on the other side
of the boulevard.
‘Hullo!’ said a masker, ‘here’s a wedding.’
‘A sham wedding,’ retorted another. ‘We are the genuine
article.’
And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and
fearing also, the rebuke of the police, the two maskers
turned their eyes elsewhere.
At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of mask-
ers had their hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which
is the crowd’s caress to masquerades; and the two maskers
who had just spoken had to face the throng with their com-
rades, and did not find the entire repertory of projectiles
of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort to the enormous
verbal attacks of the populace. A frightful exchange of met-
aphors took place between the maskers and the crowd.