BRADLEY-MARTIN BAL-MASQUE.
“APRES MOI LE DELUGE!”
MRS. Bradley-martin's sartorial kings and pseudo-queens, her dukes and DuBarrys, princes and
Pompadours, have strutted their brief hour upon the
mimic stage, disappearing at daybreak like foul night-birds or an unclean dream—have come and gone like the
rank eructation of some crapulous Sodom, a malodor
from the cloacae of ancient capitals, a breath blown from
the festering lips of half-forgotten harlots, a stench from
the sepulcher of centuries devoid of shame. Uncle Sam
may now proceed to fumigate himself after his enforced
association with royal bummers and brazen bawds; may
comb the Bradley-Martin itch bacteria out of his beard,
and consider, for the ten-thousandth time, the probable
result of his strange commingling of royalty-worshiping
millionaire and sansculottic mendicant—how best to put a
ring in the nose of the golden calf ere it become a
Phalaris bull and relegate him to its belly. Countless
columns have been written, printed, possibly read, anent
the Bradley-Martin ball—all the preachers and teachers,
editors and other able idiots pouring forth voluminous
opinions. A tidal wave of printer's ink has swept across
the continent, churned to atrous foam by hurricanes of
lawless gibberish and wild gusts of resounding gab. The
empyrean has been ripped and the tympana of the too
patient gods ravished with fulsome commendation and
foolish curse, showers of Parthian arrows and wholesale
consignments of soft-soap darkening the sun as they
hurtled hither and yon through the shrinking atmosphere.
A man dropping suddenly in from Mars with a Nicaraguan
canal scheme for the consideration of
Uncle Sam would have supposed this simian hubbub and
anserine to-do meant nothing less than a new epocha for
the universe, it being undecided whether it should be
auriferous or argentiferous—an age of gold or a cycle of
silver. Now that the costly “function” has
funked itself into howling farce, an uncomfortable failure,
and the infuscated revellers recovered somewhat from
royal katzenjammer, we find that the majestic earth has
not moved an inch out of its accustomed orbit, that the
grass still grows and the cows yet calve that the law of
gravitation remains unrepealed, and Omnipotence
continues to bring forth Mazzaroth in his season and
guide Arcturus with his sons. Perchance in time the
American people may become ashamed of having been
thrown into a panic by the painful effort of a pudgy
parvenu to outdo even the Vanderbilts in ostentatious
vulgarity. Rev. Billy Kersands Rainsford cannot save this
country with his mouth, nor can Mrs. Bradley-Martin
wreck it with her money. It is entirely too large to be
permanently affected by the folly of any one fool.
Preacher and parvenu were alike making a grandstand
play. Now that the world has observed them, and not
without interest, let us hope that they will subside for a
little season.
This Dame DuBarry extravaganza was not
without significance to those familiar with history and its
penchant for repetition; but was by no means an epoch-maker. It was simply one more festering sore on the
syphilitic body social—another unclean maggot
industriously wriggling in the malodorous carcass of a
canine. It was another evidence that civilization is in a
continual flux, flowing now forward, now backward—a
brutal confession that the new world aristocracy is
oozing at present through the Armida-palace or
Domdaniel of DuBarrydom. The Bradley-Martins are
henceforth entitled to wear their ears inter
laced with laurel leaves as a sign of superiority in their
“set.” They won the burro pennant honestly, if
not easily, daylight being plainly visible between their
foam-crested crupper and the panting nostrils of the
Vanderbilts. They are now monarch of Rag-fair, chief
gyasticuti of the boundless realm of Nescience and
Noodledom. Mrs. Bradley-Martin has triumphed
gloriously, raised herself by her own garters to the vulgar
throne of Vanity, the dais of the almighty dollar. She is
now Delphic oracle of doodle-bugs and hierophant of the
hot stuff. Viva Regina! Likewise, rats! Like most of
New York's aristocracy, she is of even nobler lineage
than Lady Vere de Vere, daughter of a hundred earls,
having been sired by a duly registered American
sovereign early in the present century. His coat-of-arms
was a cooper's adz rampant, a beer-barrel couchant and
the motto, “Two heads are better than one.”
By wearing his neighbors' cast-off clothes and feeding
his family on cornbread and “sow-belly,” he
was able to lay the foundation of that fortune which has
made his daughter
facile princeps of New
York's patricians. John Jacob Astor, who acted as royal
consort to the cooper's regal daughter in the
quadrille d'honneur, is likewise descended from
noble Knights (of Labor) and dames of high degree. He
traces his lineage in unbroken line to that haughty
Johann Jakob who came to America in the steerage,
wearing a Limburger linsey-woolsey and a pair of wooden
shoes. Beginning life in the new world as a rat-catcher,
he soon acquired a gallon jug of Holland gin, a peck of
Brummagem jewelry, and robbed the Aborigines right and
left. He wore the same shirt the year 'round, slept with
his dogs and invested his groschens in such Manhattan
dirt as he could conveniently transport upon his person.
Thus he enabled his aristocratic descendants to wax so
fat on “unearned increment” that some of them
must forswear their fealty to Uncle Sam and seek in
Yewrup a society whose rough edges will not scratch the
varnish off their culchah. Mrs. Bradley-Martin does not
exactly “look every inch a queen,” her
horizontal having developed at the expense of her
perpendicular, suggesting the rather robust physique of
her father's beer barrels. Still, she is an attractive
woman, having the ruddy complexion of an unlicked
postage stamp and the go-as-you-please features of a
Turkish carpet. Her eyes are a trifle too ferrety, but the
osculatory power of her mouth in auld lang syne must
have been such as to give Cupid spinal curvature. Her
nose retreats somewhat precipitately from the chasm;
but whether that be its original pattern, or it has been
gradually forced upwards by eager pilgrims to her shrine
of adjustable pearls, is a secret hidden in her own heart.
Like Willy Wally Astor, she finds the customs of this
country too crass to harmonize with her supersensitive
soul, and spends much time dangling about the titled
slobs “on the other side.” Some time ago she
purchased the epicene young Earl of Craven as husband
for her daughter, in the humble hope of mixing cooperage
and coronets, and may yet be gran'ma to some little Lord
Bunghole or fair Lady Firkin. As a “pusher” in
society she can give points to Mrs. Potter Palmer or the
wife of a millionaire pork-packer . Although she has
“seen” the bluff of the notorious Smith-Vanderbilt-Belmont female and “raised” her out
of her bunion repositories, she has probably not yet
reached the summit of her social ambition. Bred to
shabby gentility , Miss Alva Smith proceeded to
“splurge” when she captured a Vanderbilt. She
had probably never seen a hundred dollar bill until
permitted to finger the fortune of the profane old
ferryman who founded her husband's aristocratic family.
She was a parvenu, a
nouveau riche, and could
not rest until
she had proclaimed that fact by squandering half a million
of the man's money whom she subsequently dishonored,
on the ball which Mrs. Bradley-Martin set herself to beat.
Having been divorced “for cause,” she
proceeded to crown her gaucheries by purchasing for her
ligneous-faced daughter a disreputable duke who owes
his title to a grand-aunt's infamy—is the descendant of a
plebeian who rose to power by robbing dead soldiers and
prostituting his sister to a prince. Mrs. Bradley-Martin
has trumped two of her rival's cards—and a social game,
like seven-up, “is never out till it's played out.”
The denunciation of the ball by Dr. Rainsford
proved him not only a notoriety-seeking preacher, but a
selfish parasite who lacks sufficient sense to disguise his
hypocrisy. It contained not one word of protest against
the amassing of enormous fortunes by the few at the
expense of the many, not a single plea for justice to a
despoiled people, not one word of Christian pity for their
woes. It was simply a warning—foolishly flung from the
housetop instead of whispered in the closet—that such
reckless waste would breed discontent in the home of
want—would “make demagogues and agitators
dangerous!” Dr. Rainsford would not alter, but
conceal, existing conditions. His theory is that robbery is
all right so long as the people do not rebel thereby
imperiling the system by which they are despoiled. From
his fashionable pulpit and sumptuous home he hurls forth
his anathema-maranatha at those who would presume to
abridge the prescriptive rights of the plutocracy—who
doubt that grinding penury in a land bursting with fatness
is pleasing to the All-Father! He would by no means
curtail the wealth of Dives or better the condition of
Lazarus; but thinks it good policy for the former to refrain
from piling his plate so high in the presence of the hungry
plebs, lest the latter cease crying for
crumbs and swipe the tablecloth! Dr. Rainsford is a paid
servant of Dives, his duly ordained Pandarus. His duty is
to tickle his masters jaded palate with spiritual treacle
seasoned with Jamaica ginger, to cook up sensations as
antidotes for
ennui. If the
“agitators” cause a seismic upheaval that will
wreck the plutocracy, what is to become of the
fashionable preachers? Dr. Rainsford would not abolish
Belshazzar's feast—he would but close the door and draw
the blinds, that God's eye may not look upon the iniquity,
nor his finger trace upon the frescoed walls the fateful
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin! Save thy breath,
good doctor, to cool thy dainty broth; for, mad with
pride, thy master hears nor heeds the gabble of the
goose beneath his walls, nor the watchdog's warning.
Gnaw thy bone in peace, for the people, schooled to
patience and amused with panaceas, will scarce resent
the trampling of one more parvenu upon their necks, be
she ever so broad of beam. If some years hence they
should rise against the robbers, led on by
“dangerous demagogues,” repine not, for every
dog, sacerdotal or otherwise, can but have his day.
Turgid Talmage must likewise unload;
Talmage, who presumes to teach not only theology but
political economy; who interlards his sermons with
strange visions of Heaven, dreams of Hell, and still more
wonderful hints on how to make a people terrestrially
prosperous. He, like thousands of “able
editors,” apologizes for such vulgar extravagance by
urging that it “puts money in circulation, makes
business better, and helps the people by supplying
employment!” Has the world passed into its dotage,
or simply become an universal asylum for idiots? If
wanton waste makes business better, then Uncle Sam
has but to squander in bal-masques, or other
debauchery, his seventy-five billions of wealth to
inaugurate an industrial boom!
To gratify their taste for the barbaric, to advertise
themselves to all the earth as the eastern termini of
west-bound equines, the Bradley-Martins wiped out of
existence $500,000 of the world's wealth, leaving just
that much less available capital for productive
enterprises. They might as well have burned a building
or sunk a vessel of that value. It is urged that
“labor was employed and paid.” Quite true;
but tell me, thou resounding ministerial vacuum, thou
unreflecting editorial parrot, where is its product? What
has society to show for the expenditure of this energy?
A hole in its working capital—a hiatus in its larder caused
by employing and sustaining labor, not to produce but to
destroy. Prodigality on the part of the rich personally
benefits a few parasites, just as the bursting of a
molasses barrel fattens useless flies; but waste, by
reducing the amount of wealth available for reproduction,
breeds general want. A thousand editors have screamed
in leaded type that it were “worse for the wealthy to
hoard than waste.” Thou lunatics, go learn the
difference between a car and its load of cotton, a bolt of
muslin and that wherewith it is measured, a nation's
wealth and its exchange media. What does a man with
the wealth he “hoards?” Does he not seek to
make it earn an increment? concentration of capital may
be bad for the people, but destruction of capital takes the
tools from their hands and the food from their lips. The
court of Louis XV., which American snobs have just
expended half-a-million trying to imitate, likewise,
“made business better” by wasting wealth—
Madame DuBarry posing as “public
benefactress,” and receiving no end of encomiums
from Paris shopkeepers, jewel merchants and mantua-makers. Much money was “put in circulation and
labor employed” in furnishing forth the transient
splendors of players and prostitutes; but somehow
France did not
prosper. Finally not even the pitiless screws of the tax-farmer could wring blood from the national turnip. The
working capital of France was so far consumed that her
people stood helpless, perishing of hunger. Finally
Madame DuBarry was supplanted as “public
benefactress” by one with an even sharper tang to
her tongue, namely,
la Belle Guillotine, who
blithely led the
quadrille d'honneur, with a
Robespierre for consort, to music furnished gratis by the
raucous throats of ragged sans-culottes. Instead of lords
and ladies treading the stately minuet in Versailles
saloons adorned with beauty roses, the bare feet of
hungry men beat time to the fierce Carmagnole on
Parisian pavements.
It is not a little suggestive that the
participants in this foolish fandango should have turned
for inspiration to the court of Louis XV., whose
debauchery and depravity, the historian declares, had not
been paralleled since the year of Tiberius and
Commodus—that the Bradley-Martin “function”
should have been copied from the extravaganzas of a
harlot! What glorious exemplars for New York's Four
Hundred!—a dissolute king, and a woman thus
apostrophized by Thomas Carlyle: “Thou unclean
thing, what a course was thine: from that first truckle-bed, where thy mother bore thee to an unnamed father;
forward, through lowest subterranean depths, and over
highest sunlit heights of harlotdom and rascaldom—to the
guillotine-axe, which shears away thy vainly whimpering
head!” Of the 350 male revelers more than 100
were costumed as Louis XV., while but three considered
Washington worthy of imitation. Was this the result of
admiration in New York's “hupper sukkles” for
this wretched Roi Faineant, or King Donothing,
whose palace was a brothel, and whose harlots stripped
his subjects of their paltry earnings and left them to
perish? Louis XV., who
permitted his country to be wined, its revenues
squandered, its provinces lost, and half-a-million men
sent to an untimely death that a prostitute might be
revenged for an epigram! Is that the kind of man our
money lords admire? Louis lived until the
fleur-de-lis of France was struck down in every land and
dishonored on every sea, then died, deserted by his
drabs, cursed by his country, and was consigned to the
grave and the devil as unceremoniously as though he
were a dead dog! And now more than one hundred men
who have stripped the people to enhance the splendor of
palaces, don the royal robes of this godless rake and do
homage to bogus DuBarrys! Small wonder that Dr.
Rainsford feared such colossal impudence might serve to
remind Americans how France got rid of royalty; might
evoke a hoarse growl from the many-headed monster;
might cause some “dangerous demagogue” to
stir—perchance a Danton! Fit patron saint for our own
plutocracy is this swinish king, once called
Bien
aime, the Well-beloved; but after some thirty years
of Bradley-Martinism, named
Ame de boue—A
soul of mud! How much our super-select society
resembles the Madame DuBarrys, the Duc d'Aiguillons
and Abbe Terrays, who made the court of Louis a
byword and a reproach, his reign a crime, himself a
hissing and a shaking of the head of the nations!
Suggestive indeed that at the swellest of all
swell affairs in the American metropolis there should
appear, according to the press dispatches, “ten
Mme. de Pompadours, eight Mme. de Maintenons, four
Mme. de la Vallieres, and three Catherines of
Russia.” Good God! Has our “best
society” come to such a pass that its proudest
ladies delight to personate notorious prostitutes?”
There was no Racine or Molière, no Charlotte
Corday or Mme. de Staël”—the men posed as
profligate kings, the women as
courtesans! Yet in that same city young Mr. Seeley is
arrested for looking at a naked dancing-girl, and
“Little Egypt” has to “cut it” when
she hears the cops! And what is the difference, pray,
between a Pompadour and a Five Points
nymph du
pave? Simply this: The one rustles in silks for
diamonds, the other hustles in rags for bread, their
occupation being identical. New York was Tory even in
Revolutionary times. From its very foundation it has
been at the feet of royalty and mouthing of “divine
right.” It is ever making itself an obtuse triangle
before the god of its idolatry—its knees and nose on the
earth, its tail-feathers in the air; but we had yet to learn
that it considered “that divinity which doth behedge
a king” capable of sanctifying a woman's shame,
transforming a foul leman into an angel of light!
Catherine of Russia was an able woman, but a notorious
harlot, foul as Milton's portress of Hell; a woman who, as
Byron informs us, loved all he-things except her husband.
Is that why the masqueraders preferred the character of
Empress Catherine to that of Martha Washington? Did
they consider it more in keeping with the company?
Strange that each Russian empress was not attended by
a few of her favorite grenadiers, with “the fair-faced
Lanskoi,” her boy-lover, thrown in as
lagniappe. More than one hundred Louis
XVths and only ten Pompadours! What a pity! But we
may presume that each Pompadour, like the frail original,
was “in herself a host”! Eight Maintenons, four
Vallieres, and only one Louis XIVth present to look after
his personal property! How proud a genuine American
gentleman—one untainted with royalist fever—would have
felt to see his wife or daughter posing as the leman of
Lanskoi, of Louis XVth, or le Grande Monarque—of whom
Three-Eyed Billy of England once said that he selected
young men for his ministers and corrupt old cats for his
mistresses!
Half a million dollars gone up in frippery and
flowers, and the bedizened gang didn't get half the fun
out of it that a party of country yaps will extract from a
candy-pulling or a husking-bee. The Pompadours and
DuBarrys didn't know how. Louis XVth went around by
himself in droves, stiff and uncomfortable as a
Presbyterian Sunday-school, wishing every time his rapier
galled his kibes or tangled his royal legs that he had
remained comfortably dead in that dog-hole at St. Denis.
There was entirely too much formality for fun. The next
time New York's toad-eaters give a bal-masque
they should disguise themselves as American sovereigns
and their consorts. Of course it will be a trifle difficult
for them to play the part of respectable people; but they
will find even awkward effort in that direction refreshing,
and calculated to inspire them with respect for their
country's flag.
