e past.

In some respects the passer-by adhered so faithfully to the fashions
of the year 1806, that he was not so much a burlesque caricature as a
reproduction of the Empire period. To an observer, accuracy of detail in
a revival of this sort is extremely valuable, but accuracy of detail,
to be properly appreciated, demands the critical attention of an expert
_flaneur_; while the man in the street who raises a laugh as soon as he
comes in sight is bound to be one of those outrageous exhibitions which
stare you in the face, as the saying goes, and produce the kind of
effect which an actor tries to secure for the success of his entry. The
elderly person, a thin, spare man, wore a nut-brown spencer over a coat
of uncertain green, with white metal buttons. A man in a spencer in the
year 1844! it was as if Napoleon himself had vouchsafed to come to life
again for a couple of hours.

The spencer, as its name indicates, was the invention of an English
lord, vain, doubtless, of his handsome shape. Some time before the Peace
of Amiens, this nobleman solved the problem of covering the bust without
destroying the outlines of the figure and encumbering the person with
the hideous boxcoat, now finishing its career on the backs of aged
hackney cabmen; but, elegant figures being in the minority, the success
of the spencer was short-lived in France, English though it was.

At the sight of the spencer, men of forty or fifty mentally invested
the wearer with top-boots, pistachio-colored kerseymere small clothes
adorned with a knot of ribbon; and beheld themselves in the costumes of
their youth. Elderly ladies thought of former conquests; but the younger
men were asking each other why the aged Alcibiades had cut off the
skirts of his overcoat. The rest of the costume was so much in keeping
with the spencer, that you would not have hesitated to call the wearer
"an Empire man," just as you call a certain kind of furniture "Empire
furniture;" yet the newcomer only symbolized the Empire for those who
had known that great and magnificent epoch at any rate _de visu_, for a
certain accuracy of memory was needed for the full appreciation of the
costume, and even now the Empire is so far away that not every one of us
can picture it in its Gallo-Grecian reality.

The stranger's hat, for instance, tipped to the back of his head so as
to leave almost the whole forehead bare, recalled a certain jaunty air,
with which civilians and officials attemp