University of Virginia Library

FRENCHMEN.

In my mind there's no position more positive and unexceptionable
than that most Frenchmen, dead or alive,
are born dancers. I came pounce upon this discovery
at the assembly, and I immediately noted it down in my
register of indisputable facts—the public shall know all
about it. As I never dance cotillions, holding them to
be monstrous distorters of the human frame, and tantamount
in their operations to being broken and dislocated
on the wheel, I generally take occasion, while they are
going on, to make my remarks on the company. In the
course of these observations I was struck with the energy
and eloquence of sundry limbs, which seemed to be
flourishing about without appertaining to any body.
After much investigation and difficulty, I, at length,
traced them to their respective owners, whom I found
to be all Frenchmen to a man. Art may have meddled
somewhat in these affairs, but nature certainly did more.
I have since been considerably employed in calculations
on this subject; and by the most accurate computation
I have determined, that a Frenchman passes at least
three fifths of his time between the heavens and the
earth, and partakes eminently of the nature of a gossam
or soap bubble. One of these jack-a-lantern heroes, in
taking a figure, which neither Euclid nor Pythagoras
himself could demonstrate, unfortunately wound himself—
I mean his foot—his better part—into a lady's cobweb
muslin robe; but perceiving it at the instant, he set
himself a spinning the other way, like a top, unravelled
his step, without omitting one angle or curve, and extricated

himself without breaking a thread of the lady's
dress! he then sprung up like a sturgeon, crossed his
feet four times, and finished this wonderful evolution by
quivering his left leg, as a cat does her paw when she
has accidentally dipped it in water. No man of
“woman born,” who was not a Frenchman, or a mountebank,
could have done the like.