The model laugher
succeeded well enough in his own reign, but he could not beget a large
family. The laughers who never weep, the real clowns of life, who do
not, when the curtain drops, retire, after an infinitesimal allowance of
'cordial,' to a half-starved, complaining family, with brats that cling
round his parti-coloured stockings, and cry to him--not for jokes--but
for bread, these laughers, I say, are few and far between. You should,
therefore, be doubly grateful to me for introducing to you now one of
the most famous of them; one who with all right and title to be
lugubrious, was the merriest man of his age.
On Shrove Tuesday, in the year 1638, the good city of Mans was in a
state of great excitement: the carnival was at its height, and everybody
had gone mad for one day before turning pious for the long, dull forty
days of Lent. The market-place was filled with maskers in quaint
costumes, each wilder and more extravagant than the last. Here were
magicians with high peaked hats covered with cabalistic signs, here
Eastern sultans of the medieval model, with very fierce looks and very
large scimitars: here Amadis de Gaul with a wagging plume a yard high,
here Pantagruel, here harlequins, here Huguenots ten times more
lugubrious than the despised sectaries they mocked, here Caesar and
Pompey in trunk hose and Roman helmets, and a mass of other notabilities
who were great favourites in that day, appeared.
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