Here's a full annotated translation of Gautier's review of Napoleon
Musard and the Infernal Galop, as danced at the Opéra Ball of 1845. (Read French text)
In plain text:
The other evening, finding ourselves awake by chance at the hour of the Opera Ball, we went there:–it was the opening ball, and our vocation as journalist imposed upon us the need to assist at every first performance. We are the assessors of Paris' pleasures. One does not pass the cup to the public until we have wet our lips on it and one sees at the end of twenty-four hours that we are still not turning green and marbled with black blotches.
The masked ball always saddened us, either by the joyous emotion of others in which we cannot partake, or by the kind of instinctive aversion that the mask inspires in us and which derives no doubt from some childhood terror. –– More cheerful imaginations than our own always imagine beguiling faces behind the black satin, and see behind this face of goat and monkey to paper beard shredded from anthology illustrations, angel or sylph heads; for us the hideous mask nearly always conceals a horrifying face; all the monsters, striges, ghouls, lamias, profit by the occasion and disguise. Even the women we know, and who are notoriously pretty, become suspect to us as soon as they don the domino; this is not a very favourable disposition to pass an agreeable night at the ball. We thus walked in quite a gloomy fashion into the mezzanine, crammed with all the world, scarcely having room to pull our handkerchief to wipe the brow that had been made so hot.––We nonetheless believed ourselves hardened against the warmth by our exertions in Africa, in the months of July and August, in full sunlight, when one of our friends came to gather us and conduct us onto the dance-floor, at the foot of the musicians' platform, to make us look at Musard, unleashing the carnival with a signal of his conductor's baton.
Musard was there, bleak, livid and pock-marked, arms outstretched, expression fixed. To be sure, it would difficult for a priest of bacchanals to have a face more sombre and more sinister; this man, who sheds joy and delirium on so many crazed heads, acts like one meditating on the Night Thoughts of Young or the Tombs of Harvey. –– After that, the pleasure that one gives away one no longer has, and this is no doubt what renders comic poets so morose.
The moment came, he was bent over his pulpit, stretched out the arms, and a tempest of tones suddenly exploded into a fog of noise which soared over the heads; lightning-fast notes flew back and forth across the tumult of noise with their piercing lightning, and one would think that the horns of the last Judgement had been hired to play quadrilles and waltzes. We [recognised?] in this sabbath the family of instruments of our friend Adolphe Sax––the dead would dance to such music. Would you believe that somebody came up with a contradanse entitled The Path of Iron; it begins with the imitation of horrible blows of the whistle whch announces the departure of convoys; the wheezing of machines, the collision of valves, the upheaval of the sword-fights are perfectly imitated here. After this comes one of those crushed and breathless galops next to which the sabbath ring is a tranquil dance.
A torrent of Pierros and Débardeuses span around an islet of stangnant masks in the middle of the dance-floor, rattling the floorboards like a cavalry charge. Beware those who fall.
It is only at this price that one can still be amused today; he must, by dint of leaps, of pivots, of extravagant dislocations, by swinging of the head to be dismantled from the neck, to achieve a kind of cerebral congestion: this intoxication of movement or delirious gymnastics, has something strange and supernatural. One would think one saw sick people attacked by cholera or Saint-Vitus' Dance.
We were at Blida and in Ben-Kaddour's Haousch, at the epileptic fits of snake-charmers, those terrible convulsioners. We saw in Constantine the dance for the conjuration of the Djinns, but all this is moderate in comparison with the Parisian cachucha.
Of which ennuis do such amusements make the counterweight?
As if we were kept at home, we watch to step out from a cafe a band of forty pierrots all costumed identically, who returned to the Opera Ball, preceded by a banner where were written these words: How bitter is life!
In plain text:
The other evening, finding ourselves awake by chance at the hour of the Opera Ball, we went there:–it was the opening ball, and our vocation as journalist imposed upon us the need to assist at every first performance. We are the assessors of Paris' pleasures. One does not pass the cup to the public until we have wet our lips on it and one sees at the end of twenty-four hours that we are still not turning green and marbled with black blotches.
The masked ball always saddened us, either by the joyous emotion of others in which we cannot partake, or by the kind of instinctive aversion that the mask inspires in us and which derives no doubt from some childhood terror. –– More cheerful imaginations than our own always imagine beguiling faces behind the black satin, and see behind this face of goat and monkey to paper beard shredded from anthology illustrations, angel or sylph heads; for us the hideous mask nearly always conceals a horrifying face; all the monsters, striges, ghouls, lamias, profit by the occasion and disguise. Even the women we know, and who are notoriously pretty, become suspect to us as soon as they don the domino; this is not a very favourable disposition to pass an agreeable night at the ball. We thus walked in quite a gloomy fashion into the mezzanine, crammed with all the world, scarcely having room to pull our handkerchief to wipe the brow that had been made so hot.––We nonetheless believed ourselves hardened against the warmth by our exertions in Africa, in the months of July and August, in full sunlight, when one of our friends came to gather us and conduct us onto the dance-floor, at the foot of the musicians' platform, to make us look at Musard, unleashing the carnival with a signal of his conductor's baton.
Musard was there, bleak, livid and pock-marked, arms outstretched, expression fixed. To be sure, it would difficult for a priest of bacchanals to have a face more sombre and more sinister; this man, who sheds joy and delirium on so many crazed heads, acts like one meditating on the Night Thoughts of Young or the Tombs of Harvey. –– After that, the pleasure that one gives away one no longer has, and this is no doubt what renders comic poets so morose.
The moment came, he was bent over his pulpit, stretched out the arms, and a tempest of tones suddenly exploded into a fog of noise which soared over the heads; lightning-fast notes flew back and forth across the tumult of noise with their piercing lightning, and one would think that the horns of the last Judgement had been hired to play quadrilles and waltzes. We [recognised?] in this sabbath the family of instruments of our friend Adolphe Sax––the dead would dance to such music. Would you believe that somebody came up with a contradanse entitled The Path of Iron; it begins with the imitation of horrible blows of the whistle whch announces the departure of convoys; the wheezing of machines, the collision of valves, the upheaval of the sword-fights are perfectly imitated here. After this comes one of those crushed and breathless galops next to which the sabbath ring is a tranquil dance.
A torrent of Pierros and Débardeuses span around an islet of stangnant masks in the middle of the dance-floor, rattling the floorboards like a cavalry charge. Beware those who fall.
It is only at this price that one can still be amused today; he must, by dint of leaps, of pivots, of extravagant dislocations, by swinging of the head to be dismantled from the neck, to achieve a kind of cerebral congestion: this intoxication of movement or delirious gymnastics, has something strange and supernatural. One would think one saw sick people attacked by cholera or Saint-Vitus' Dance.
We were at Blida and in Ben-Kaddour's Haousch, at the epileptic fits of snake-charmers, those terrible convulsioners. We saw in Constantine the dance for the conjuration of the Djinns, but all this is moderate in comparison with the Parisian cachucha.
Of which ennuis do such amusements make the counterweight?
As if we were kept at home, we watch to step out from a cafe a band of forty pierrots all costumed identically, who returned to the Opera Ball, preceded by a banner where were written these words: How bitter is life!
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