The document describes the lifestyle and behaviors of "beaux" in 18th century England. Beaux were young gentlemen whose sole ambition was to enjoy themselves and seek public admiration through frivolous displays. They were vain, heartless, and insolent men who spent their time flirting, gambling, drinking, and engaging in other empty pursuits without concern for politics or society. Beaux were known for their elaborate fashion including colorful clothes, long periwigs, patches, and scented accessories. Their daily routines revolved around leisure activities and maintaining their public image.
The document describes the lifestyle and behaviors of "beaux" in 18th century England. Beaux were young gentlemen whose sole ambition was to enjoy themselves and seek public admiration through frivolous displays. They were vain, heartless, and insolent men who spent their time flirting, gambling, drinking, and engaging in other empty pursuits without concern for politics or society. Beaux were known for their elaborate fashion including colorful clothes, long periwigs, patches, and scented accessories. Their daily routines revolved around leisure activities and maintaining their public image.
The document describes the lifestyle and behaviors of "beaux" in 18th century England. Beaux were young gentlemen whose sole ambition was to enjoy themselves and seek public admiration through frivolous displays. They were vain, heartless, and insolent men who spent their time flirting, gambling, drinking, and engaging in other empty pursuits without concern for politics or society. Beaux were known for their elaborate fashion including colorful clothes, long periwigs, patches, and scented accessories. Their daily routines revolved around leisure activities and maintaining their public image.
The document describes the lifestyle and behaviors of "beaux" in 18th century England. Beaux were young gentlemen whose sole ambition was to enjoy themselves and seek public admiration through frivolous displays. They were vain, heartless, and insolent men who spent their time flirting, gambling, drinking, and engaging in other empty pursuits without concern for politics or society. Beaux were known for their elaborate fashion including colorful clothes, long periwigs, patches, and scented accessories. Their daily routines revolved around leisure activities and maintaining their public image.
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To be a beau was the sole ambition of the young
gentlemen of those times, and they had absolutely no
further aim in life than to enjoy themselves in every known and unknown way. They were frivolous, heartless, vicious, vain, believed themselves to be men of wit, were scandalmongers, insolent and proud. These stately peacocks did nothing privately, all was display, a ceaseless search for the public eye where they should be watched, admired and envied. They studied all their movements, postures and poses. The bows they made to each other; the ceremonious way they offered and took their snuff; their flirtations with the belles which took place in rooms, in the street, from their carriages, at balls and masques these countless frivolities were the full and only content of their utterly useless lives. Wonderfully dainty these pretty men looked in their brightly coloured clothes, their carefully combed periwigs halfway down their backs, their rich silk or satin waistcoats embroidered with gold or silver lace, their velvet breeches and coloured stockings. Their dainty, scented handkerchiefs hanging with studied negligence from their pockets, their rose-coloured gloves, the carefully disposed patches on their faces, their meticulously folded neckcloths, their mincing steps as they walked all earned them the title of the beaux. They practised intrigue to a high degree, composed lampoons, epigrams and libels; they had successive mistresses, betraying each one in turn, and were ribald and coquettish. They wrote missives of love on scented paper tied with pretty ribbons, they cared nothing at all for politics, the welfare of the country, or any other society but their own. They drank tea, went to the theatre, attended cock fights, played at hazard with dice or cards or both. It was the general habit of a beau to remain in bed until midday, having spent the night drinking, gambling and wenching. At noon precisely they would receive visitors, sitting up in bed in fine cambric nightshirts elaborately trimmed with lace, their coiffeurs or valets carefully combing the long periwigs covering their pillows. They would then rise, wash in water specially distilled by quacks who guaranteed that it would make them beautiful, put tiny patches on cheek and chin, rub essence of orange or jasmine on their eyebrows, soak their handkerchiefs in rose-water and spend an hour or two meticulously arranging their neckcloths before a mirror. After eating a dainty dinner, they would sally forth in a sedan chair to one of their many haunts, for they never went on foot if they could avoid doing so. The first rendezvous of any beau was his favourite coffee house, crowded always with men of all degree; there he took snuff, read the gazettes, the circulating ballads and broadsheets, discussed scandal, exchanged wit and repartee, and drank coffee or chocolate. He then sauntered out to the next assignment in some house, salon, bedchamber, or in the Mall, Hyde Park or St James's Park.
Sentimental Education - An Autobiographical Novel (Complete Edition): From the prolific French writer, known for his debut novel Madame Bovary, works like Salammbô, November, A Simple Heart, Herodias and The Temptation of Saint Anthony
Sentimental Education (Autobiographical Novel): From the prolific French writer, known for his debut novel Madame Bovary, works like Salammbô, November, A Simple Heart, Herodias and The Temptation of Saint Anthony
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