Evening-dressed

When Marat took out a pistol at the tribune, and exclaimed, “One word more, and I shoot myself,” or when David rose from the extreme bench of the Mountain and shouted out, “I demand, I insist upon it, that you assassinate me,” they were scarcely more ripe for Charenton than M. Odillon Barrot, when, Cataline-like, he rushed from the Palais Bourbon, “Abiit, excepit, evasit, erupit”—when, Sylla-like, “He dared depart / In savage grandeur home,” to return, the next day, with the same decent demeanour and benign appearance, at the head of the same array of evening-dressed and white-cravatted individuals, professing bit by bit, and day after day, principles which in their accelerated advance approach them more and more to sans culottes.

As for dancing in my first set of tails, even a slow foxtrot induced the exhaustion of a sauna, which is maybe why the great eponymous number in Top Hat, with [Fred] Astaire and a score of identical evening-dressed gentlemen, never fails to amaze me with its effect of formal energy unleashed without apparent effort.

Of one thing we can be sure: with a maestro conducting an evening-dressed cast featuring knights and dames of the musical establishment in a grand concert hall, this was not The Threepenny Opera as its creators Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill either envisaged or wanted it.