Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 December 1893 — Crazy France. [ARTICLE]

Crazy France.

It became positively dangerous during the Revolution to pronounce the word royal or king, and especially the name of any monarch who had reigned in France. The innocent King of “Twelfth Night” was suppressed, and the nomenclature of the “devil’s picture boards” thoroughly revised. For a little while the king of diamonds and of clubs became indiscriminately the “executive power” of diamonds or the “veto” of clubs, hut the card manufacturers, Urbain Jaume and Jean-Demosthene Dugoure, averred in Le Journal de Paris (March, 1793) that “a stanch Republican, even when playing a game, ought not to use expressions which constantly remind all his hearers of a state of despotism and inequality.” Hence, they inform all and sundry that for the future the products manufactured by them will bear entirely new titles, the tyrants will become genii, their consorts “liberties.” jacks “equalities,” and aces “laws.” The term, “reine-abeille,” the term applied to the unique honey bee in the hive by French naturalists, was changed into “l’abeille pondeuse.” Citizens whose name happened to be Leori (King) were invited to change it into Laloi, (law), and the sight of a King, even under adverse circumstances, grated so terribly upon the patriots’ nerves that one day a shop was sacked in the Palais-Egalite because its window contained an engraving of Charles I. on the scaffold. Nowhere did the objection to words quasi-distinctive of the old regime become so tyrannical as in the playhouse. The slightest allusion to the monarchy provoked a disturbance, nay, a riot, which nine times out of ten had to be quelled by -the intervention of the authorities. Cliton, ■in Corneille’s Meuteur, says: SUe luge a la place et se norame Lucrece uelle place? * * * Royale.' The last word had scarcely left the actor’s lips when the house rose at him as one man. “II n’y a plus de Place Royale; e’est la Place des Piques,” they howled, and, in spite of meter and everything else, the line had then and there to be repeated, as corrected by the audience.—The Fortnightly Review.