Capering & Kickery

General Fleury's Bal d'enfants travesti, 1867

On Tuesday, April 23, 1867, a children's fancy dress ball, or bal travesti, was held at the home of General Émile Félix Fleury, a prominent senator and equerry of the Emperor Napoleon III. The event was covered in the pages of Le Monde Illustré on May 4, 1867, with the illustration below (click to enlarge) and a brief description of the event.

Bal d’enfants travesti, donné le 23 avril, chez le général Fleury,
grand écuyer de S. M. L’Empereur — Le galop final.

Children's fancy dress ball, given the 23rd of April at the home of Général Fleury,
Grand Equerry of His Majesty the Emperor — The final galop.

A full transcription of the original article with my translation is given at the end of this post.

A Masquerade in Montana, 1899

And...it's back to masquerades, fancy dress balls, crazy cotillion figures, and other fun for the month of October!  First up: a Christmas masquerade ball in Montana in 1899.

The Degree of Honor masquerade ball was held on Christmas night at the Hefferlin Opera House in Livingston, Montana, the elaborate building at right in the postcard photo at left; click to enlarge.  At this time, the Degree of Honor was the ladies' auxiliary of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, a post-Civil War "fraternal" mutual benefit society providing insurance, burial policies, etc, to working-class men.  In the late 1890s, the Degree of Honor was said to have had 40,000 members nationally.  It later spun off into a separate organization and existed independently until 2017.

Livingston itself was tiny at the time, having been founded as a cluster of tents at a future railroad stop in 1882.  Even today, its population is under ten thousand people (per the 2020 census); at the time of the ball, it was probably only around a thousand.  This puts into perspective its description as "largely attended" in the coverage of the ball in the social column of The Anaconda Standard on Sunday, December 31, 1889: seventy-five couples following the leaders of the march.  For a town of that size, that is actually quite impressive, and the coverage noted that the event succeeded both socially and financially.