There was a ball at the _Boule-Noire_ one Thursday. The dancing was in full blast.
The ball-room had the ordinary appearance of modern places of amusement for the people. It was brilliant with false richness and tawdry splendor. There were paintings there, and tables at which wine was sold, gilded chandeliers and glasses that held a quartern of brandy, velvet hangings and wooden benches, the shabbiness and rusticity of an ale-house with the decorations of a cardboard palace.
Garnet velvet lambrequins with a fringe of gold lace hung at the windows and were economically copied in paint beneath the mirrors, which were lighted by three-branched candelabra. On the walls, in large white panels, pastoral scenes by Boucher, surrounded with painted frames, alternated with Prud'hon's _Seasons_, which were much astonished to find themselves in such a place; and above the windows and doors dropsical Loves gamboled among five roses protruding from a pomade jar of the sort used by suburban hair-dressers. Square pillars, embellished with meagre arabesques, supported the ceiling in the centre of the hall, where there was a small octagonal stand containing the orchestra. An oaken rail, waist high, which served as a back to a cheap red bench, enclosed the dancers. And against this rail, on the outside, were tables painted green and two rows of benches, surrounding the dance with a café.
In the dancers' enclosure, beneath the fierce glare and the intense heat of the gas, were women of all sorts, dressed in dark, worn, rumpled woolens, women in black tulle caps, women in black _paletots_, women in _caracos_ worn shiny at the seams, women in fur tippets bought of open-air dealers and in shops in dark alleys. And in the whole assemblage not one of the youthful faces was set off by a collar, not a glimpse of a white skirt could be seen among the whirling dancers, not a glimmer of white about these women, who were all dressed in gloomy colors, the colors of want, to the ends of their unpolished shoes. This absence of linen gave to the ball an aspect as of poverty in mourning; it imparted to all the faces a touch of gloom and uncleanness, of lifelessness and earthiness--a vaguely forbidding aspect, in which there was a suggestion of the Hôtel-Dieu and the Mont-de-Piété!