Identifier: theirmajestiesas00paoluoft (find matches)
Title: Their majesties as I knew them; personal reminiscences of the kings and queens of Europe
Year: 1911 (1910s)
Authors: Paoli, Xavier, 1835- Teixeira de Mattos, Alexander, 1865-1921
Subjects: Europe -- Kings and rulers
Publisher: New York, Sturgis (and) Walton
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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vellous costumes! The Cambodian balletgirls, when dancing in public, wear clothes that are simply fairylike. They have bodices of silk stitched with gold adadorned with precious stones. These bodices are very heavy and are fitted upon them and sewn before each performance, so they form as it were a new skin and reveal with a clearness that is nothing short of impressive the slightest undulations ofthe body. The dressers take two or three hours to clothe the dancers, after wich they paint the girls faces and deck them out with bracelets, necklaces and rings of priceless value. Sometimes also the dancers fingers are slipped into long, bent, golden claws, which describe harmonious curves in space. Lastly, the headdress consists of either the traditional pnom—a sort of pointed hat, all of gold and fastened on by clutches that grip the head or a wreath of enormous flowers, or else of a pale-tinted silk handkerchief rolled low over the temples. The dancers and their dances achieved, as may
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THE KING OF CAMBODIA 345 be imagined, no small success, first at the Elysee and afterwards in the Bois de Boulogne, where a gala performance was given, in the open-air theatre of the Pre Catelan, by the light of the electric lamps. Between whiles, they took drives through Paris, which gave rise to all sorts of astonished and enthusiastic manifestations on their part, much to the delight of their guides; for they had the mental attitude of little girls and, when, after a week, they had to go back to Marseilles, where they formed the principal attraction at the Colonial Exliibition, their despair was something immense. It was as much as we could do to console them by presenting them all with mechanical rabbits and unbreakable dolls. And the King, once more, was bored. He was so thoroughly bored that, a few days after the departure of his ballet girls, he resolved to go and spend a couple of days at Nancy, in order to see a dozen or two young Cambodians who had been attending the local industrial sch

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