so as to show their lean, shrivelled legs and yellow thighs.
Nothing queerer could be imagined than all these charming
fashions and finery of the frivolous century of Louis
XV., these Watteau shepherdess costumes, furbelows,
plumes and laces, upon these black, ugly-faced, flat-nosed,
woolly-headed, frightful people. Thus decked out they
were no longer even negroes and negresses; they were apes
and monkeys.

Add to all this a deafening uproar. Every mouth that
was not making a contortion was emitting yells.

I have not finished; you must accept the picture complete
to its minutest detail.

Twenty paces from me was an inn, a frightful hovel,
whose sign was a wreath of dried herbs hung upon a pickaxe.
Nothing but a roof window and three-legged tables.
A low ale-house, rickety tables. Negroes and mulattoes
were drinking there, intoxicating and besotting themselves,
and fraternising. One has to have seen these things to
depict them. In front of the tables of the drunkards a
fairly young negress was displaying herself. She was
dressed in a man's waistcoat, unbuttoned, and a woman's
skirt loosely attached. She wore no chemise and her
abdomen was bare. On her head was a magistrate's wig. On
one shoulder she carried a parasol, and on the other a rifle
with bayonet fixed.

A few whites, stark naked, ran about miserably in the