Volume 183601

Paris and the Parisians in 1835.

  • Frances Trollope
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Paris and the Parisians in 1835. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and appears to me to be applied by the young and innovating to everything which bears the stamp of the taste, principles, or feelings of time past. That part of the French population to whom the epithet of rococo is thus applied, may be under- stood to contain all varieties of old-fashionism, from the gentle advocate for laced coats and diamond sword-knots, up to the high-minded venerable loyalist, who only loves his rightful king the better because he has no means left to requite his love. Such is the interpretation of rococo in the mouth of a doctrinaire; but if a republican speaks it, he means that it should include also every gradation of orderly obe- dience, even to the powers that be; and, in fact, whatever else may be considered as essentially connected either with law or gospel. There is another adjective which appears also to recur so frequently as fully to merit, in the same manner, the distinc- tion of being considered as fashionable. It is, however, a good old legitimate word, admirably expressive too, and at present of more than ordinary utility. This is ‘‘décousu;”’ and it seems to be the epithet now given by the sober-minded to all that smacks of the rambling nonsense of the new school of literature, and of all those fragments of opinions which hang so loosely about the minds of the young men who dis- course fashionably of philosophy at Paris: Were the whole population to be classed under two great divisions, I doubt if they could be more expressively desig- nated than by these two appellations, the décousu and the ro- coco. I have already stated who it is that form the rococo class: the décousu division may be considered as embracing the whole of the ultra-romantic school of authors, be they no- velists, dramatists, or poets; all shades of republicans, from the avowed eulogists of the ‘spirited Robespierre” to the
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