Read Leading the Blind for Free Online Page A

by performers outrageously overdressed … The company is not the most select, and the performance tends to be immoral. Respectable people keep aloof.’
    While the farces at the Théâtre du Palais Royal are said to be of a character ‘not always exceptionable’, the concerts of the Conservatoire de Musique ‘enjoy a European celebrity. The highest order of classical music, by Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, etc., as well as by the most celebrated French and Italian composers, is performed with exquisite taste and precision.’
    Our traveller might well look in at one of the many balls given in the summer because, though the society ‘is by no means select, they deserve to be visited by the stranger on account of the gay, brilliant, and novel spectacle they present. The rules of decorum are tolerably well observed, but it need hardly be said that ladies cannot go to them with propriety. Dancing takes place every evening, but the place is frequented by different people on different evenings when many handsome, richly dressed women of the “demimonde” and exquisites of the boulevards assemble here, while on the other evenings, when the admission is 3 francs, and women enter without payment, the society is still less respectable.’
    Bals Masqués du Grand-Opéra took place every Saturday evening, and presented ‘a scene of boistrous merriment and excitement, and if visited by ladies they should be witnessed from the boxes only. The female frequenters of these balls wear masks or dominoes, the men are generally in evening costume.’
    Should our gentleman-traveller wish to call at the Stock Exchange, the Bourse, he may walk along boulevards which were once paved, but ‘as the stones had frequently been employed in the construction of barricades, they were replaced in 1850 by a macadamised asphalt roadway’. The Municipal Authorities of Barcelona, it was once said, solved that problem by numbering the cobblestones so that they could be put back in the correct order after each pronunciamiento . In Paris: ‘The trees with which the boulevards are flanked are a source of constant trouble to the municipal authorities, being frequently killed by the gas lamps’.
    The Bourse is open for business from midday, we are told, but visitors are admitted to the galleries from nine o’clock onwards. Numerous private carriages drive up, and ‘the money-seeking throng hurries into the building. The deafening noise, the shouting, the excited gestures of the spectators, and the eager cupidity depicted in their features, produce a most unpleasant impression on the mind of the neutral spectator.’
    Baedeker’s Paris , 1874, appeared only three years after the upheavals of the Commune, but as soon as order had been restored the tourists flocked back. England had always been much like a box at the theatre, from which heads wagged censoriously at disturbances on the Continent.
    From the Bourse our traveller might make his way to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, where public executions occurred up to 1830. ‘Hither,’ Murray said, ‘Catherine de Medici and her son came in 1574 to see the torture and death of Montgomeri, for having accidentally slain in a tournament Henry II her husband. In 1676 the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, the notorious poisoner, was burnt here. Madame de Sevigné, a spectator, describes the scene in one of her letters. Cartouche the robber was broken alive here in 1721: and Damiens, so late as 1737, was put to death under the most protracted tortures (torn asunder by 4 horses), for attempting to assassinate Louis XV. In 1766 Lally Tollendal, the brave antagonist of the English in India, was hurried to execution with a gag on his mouth.’
    Accounts of horrors abound in all guidebooks of the period, and indeed the various French upheavals were in a traveller’s living memory, as the Second World War is with us today. At the