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An Historical Account Below is an description of the Parisian Beaux Arts Ball from the 1880s written by E. Berry Wall in his book "Neither Pest Nor Puritan": OOOOOOOOH, LA, LA! 'After all, why not?' The famous Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris is the training school for architects, painters and sculptors, run by the French Government and housed in a beautiful old building at the corner of the Rue Bonaparte and the Seine River. It looks across at the Louvre, but the students, for the most part, do their work in ateliers, outside the building. What they do is supervised by a master in his line. He is known as the patron. All these students get together every spring and stage a reunion known throughout Europe as the Bal des Quat'z Arts, the Ball of the Four Arts. It is a riot, a revival of paganism, known elsewhere only in Italy. It is also, in its way, a hymn to beauty, a living explosion of the senses and the emotions. The ball I went to was like nothing in the world I had ever seen before, and I must say that I enjoyed it immensely. No one but the students and their friends, you understand, are supposed to go to this ball. To this rule there are a few minor exceptions, but only about thirty. These privileged persons are allowed to pay a high price - anywhere from thirty to fifty dollars - for what is known as "a ticket from the committee." With money the committee gets in this way and the sums it collects from each student...the committee pays for the ball. I got in on a committee ticket, but I must say right away that the students themselves, though they spend very little money, accomplish wonders with their decoration of the boxes, known as loges, and the floats they set up on wheels.... It was, I should say, toward two in the morning when the parade of the floats began circling the hall crowded with some two thousand men and women, mostly entirely naked. In the loges there had been an endless drinking of champagne and endless tribute to love. Now things were to be judged from the artistic standpoint. On the floats, marvelously and variously decorated, men and women assumed classic, statuesque poses - few, if any, devoted to any other subject than love....In the center of the float that had taken the prize was a slender, lovely creature, quite nude, perfect from head to foot. It was the Duchess. |
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