by little, hearts warm up to the matter; people speak about it in the
street after dinner; ideas are exchanged:

"What a celebration it will be, my friend; what a celebration!"

"Have you heard the news? All the rulers are coming incognito, as
bourgeois, in order to see it."

"I hear that the Emperor of Russia has arrived; he expects to go about
everywhere with the Prince of Wales."

"It certainly will be a fine celebration!"

It is going to a celebration; what Monsieur Patissot, Parisian bourgeois,
calls a celebration; one of these nameless tumults which, for fifteen
hours, roll from one end of the city to the other, every ugly specimen
togged out in its finest, a mob of perspiring bodies, where side by side
are tossed about the stout gossip bedecked in red, white and blue
ribbons, grown fat behind her counter and panting from lack of breath,
the rickety clerk with his wife and brat in tow, the laborer carrying his
youngster astride his neck, the bewildered provincial with his foolish,
dazed expression, the groom, barely shaved and still spreading the
perfume of the stable. And the foreigners dressed like monkeys, English
women like giraffes, the water-carrier, cleaned up for the occasion, and
the innumerable phalanx of little bourgeois, inoffensive little people,
amused at everything. All this crowding and pressing, the sweat and dust,
and the turmoil, all these eddies of human flesh, trampling of corns
beneath the feet of your neighbors, this city all topsy-turvy, these vile
odors, these frantic efforts toward nothing, the breath of millions of
people, all redolent of garlic, give to Monsieur Patissot all the joy