The Arcades Project - Operi

the coarse moustaches of these inferior brigands-when I thought I perceived
beneath their repulsive appearance some characteristics that were not at all unfamiliar.
As I looked more closely, I became convinced that the owner of the master
thieves (who was also the owner of the other waxworks), wanting to make use of
some wax figures that were no longer in fashion, or of some commissioned portraits
that were subsequently rejected, had dressed them up in rags, loaded them with
chains, and slightly disfigured them in order to place them here with the great
thieves . ... I could not help smiling when I considered that the wife of one of the
subjects might well discover, among these gentlemen, the portrait of her husband
that had once been so gloriously commissioned. And, really, I am not joking when
I say that I saw among this group an excellent likeness of Linguet, * who, several
months earlier, had enjoyed a place of honor in the other room, and who undoubtedly
had been transported here for economic reasons, and to fill out the prison."
(*Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, 1736-1794; polygraph and lawyer; executed on
the guillotine.) J. B. Pujoulx, Paris idafinduXVIll" siecle (Paris, 1801), pp. 102-
103. 0 Colportage 0 [Q),3]
"Waiting" can be associated with the exhibition of imperial panoramas as much
as with boredom. It is highly significant that Brod, iu a gloss on "panorama;' hits
upon all the keywords of this investigation: "fashion;' "boredom;' "gaslight,"
w= ,
"A melange of Morgue and Musee de Luxembourg" : this was how Jules Claretie
characterized the battle panoramas. La Vie a Paris, 1881 (paris), p. 438. In these
panoramas we perceive that wars, too, are subject to fashion. Max Brod, iu his
"Panorama;' sees "iuactive officers ... searching about for suitable battlefields to
wage their imagiuary colonial wars;' It is a wardrobe of battles: the impecunious
come and look around to see if somewhere there is not a used battlefield tlley can
make their own without goiug to great expense. [Q) ,5]
Play on words with " -rama" (on the model of "diorama") in Balzac, at the beginning
of Pere Goriot.2 [Q),6]
Setup of the panoramas: View from a raised platform, surrounded by a balus­
trade, of surfaces lyiug round aboUl and beneath. The painting runs along a
cyliudrical wall approxlinately a hundred meters long and twenty meters high.
The principal panoramas of the great panorama painter Prevost: Paris, To ulon,
Rome, Naples, Amsterdam, Ti lsit, Wagram, Calais, Antwerp, London, Florence,
Jerusalem, Athens. Among his pupils : Daguerre. [Q)a,l]
1838: the Rotonde des Panoramas constructed by Hittorff. 0 Iron 0 [Q)a,2]
Panorama at the Paris Exhibition of 1855. [Q)a,3]