Booksellers and milliners lived on
terms of mutual understanding.
But it was in the passage known by the pompous title of the "Glass
Gallery" that the oddest trades were carried on. Here were
ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and sights of every
description, from the kind where there is nothing to see to panoramas
of the globe. One man who has since made seven or eight hundred
thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here by hanging
out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the inscription
in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see. Admittance,
two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one person alone,
nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted a great
looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann of
Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring had been touched, "You see
here, gentlemen, something that God can never see through all
eternity, that is to say, your like. God has not His like." And out
you went, too shamefaced to confess to your stupidity.
Voices issued from every narrow doorway, crying up the merits of
Cosmoramas, views of Constantinople, marionettes, automatic
chess-players, and performing dogs who would pick you out the prettiest
woman in the company. The ventriloquist Fritz-James flourished here in
the Cafe Borel before he went to fight and fall at Montmartre with the
young lads from the Ecole polytechnique.
Pages:
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184