3-028-677 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Midnight mass at the Madeleine, Paris, on Christmas Eve, 1870. '...the Paris churches are densely crowded with congregations composed of every class of Parisian society; for the celebration of high mass on Christmas Eve is one of the greatest ceremonies in the Roman Catholic religion, and the advanced hour of the night at which the ceremony takes place in no way damps the seemingly religious ardour of this gay people. Among the crowd...may be seen the honest-looking and fat-faced bourgeois with his wife and family, who appear delighted at the idea of sitting-up for the reveillant, and the well-to-do tradesman with his two or three grownup daughters looking very coquettish in their toilettes de dimanche. Here, too, is the viveur who has consented to abandon his stall at the opera, or his place at the bacarat table...to accompany his mother and unmarried sisters to the messe de minuit. A lady of fashion...has, perhaps, just alighted from the little brougham which is making its way through the crowd of pedestrians; and the heavy pair-horse barouche has, perhaps, brought a family from the Faubourg St. Germain, or a party of foreigners from one of the fashionable hotels'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.