THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
spond with my ideals; but it was, after all, the French way, which, with all its histrionic superficialities, had in the past, especially in the great revolution, proved itself very real and serious and had produced tremendous results.
However, what I saw of political action on the public stage had a sobering effect on me, and this effect was intensified and confirmed by my observations in the Latin Quarter and in public places of amusement of the dissoluteness of student life—the habitual life of young men who might be considered the flower of French youth. I shall never forget the impression made upon me and my friends by a masked ball at the opera which some of us young Germans visited during the carnival season of 1851. Everybody was admitted who could pay for his ticket and provide himself with the prescribed attire, that is to say, the ordinary evening dress or some fancy costume. The ball began about midnight. The multitude present consisted of all ranks and conditions, among whom I recognized a good many students living in the Latin Quarter, with their grizettes or “petites femmes,” and of other persons who had come, not all to take part in the dance, but to witness this characteristic spectacle of Parisian life. The anterooms were teeming with women in dominos, who approached men walking about in a very confidential way. The great auditory of the opera and the stage were arranged as a ballroom. Dancing began in comparatively decent manner, but degenerated soon into the ordinary cancan. Police agents moved through the room to prevent the grossest violations of decency. At first they seemed to succeed in a degree—at least the dancers seemed to keep themselves in check in their immediate presence. But as the hours advanced, the temperature of the room rose, and the blood of the dancers became heated, the business of the guardians of order grew more and more hopeless. At last all
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