THE DAILY

As was noted in connection with a recent accident, crowds now disdain the innocent and peaceful games that were once popular at folk fairs and neighborhood festivals; they gravitate toward violent pleasures and seek out brutal distractions. They want revelry and fantasies that match the customs of the day.
Thus, engineers strive to design, and manufacturers to build, devices that convulse and dislocate, tear and torture the human body, agitate and jostle it better and more than it could be in a boat tossed by the waves of a raging sea. For an "attraction" to be fashionable today, anguish and suffering must be mingled with the joy it provides and enhanced with a kind of horrible and delicious spice.

Take a stroll through one of those places that attract crowds and see the games they gravitate toward. Here, for example, is a sort of circular machine, where there is room for four people; they are carefully tied together with a sturdy strap attached to the sides of the apparatus. A shrill whistle blows. The machine starts moving. The machine rolls and pivots, sliding on a rail whose sudden bends throw it to one side, then the other, at the moment when you least expect it.

Surprise, anxiety, and pain thus contort features and turn faces pale. We see women who seem close to fainting; their heads are shaken to the point of breaking the vertebrae in their necks; with one hand, the unfortunate women cling to the apparatus that tortures them. With the other, they press a handkerchief to their pale lips. One can guess that nausea is about to translate into a realistic gesture, a physiological act awaited by the cruel and mocking curiosity of the spectators.
The machine finally stops, and the customers, freed, stagger down. Ten minutes later, the dizziness dissipated, they are seen coming to claim the satisfaction of enduring the torment and experiencing the discomfort of which, it seems, they should, however, be weary and disgusted.

Elsewhere, a sort of infernal carousel also wins the crowd's approval: also composed of carts, it seems to combine the sensation of a swing with the pleasures of a roller coaster, but enhanced, naturally, by those unexpected and sudden jolts, without which, evidently, there is no complete joy for the new generations.
This sophisticated ride has, above all, the predilections of women; They visibly find the game pleasant at first; but soon it upsets them in a strange way: this time again, nausea is imminent; the effects of seasickness at its onset are revealed by the total loss of modesty and coquetry; dresses, lifted by the displacement of air, reveal much more than the knees, without the victims noticing or worrying. Indecent and mocking glances monitor the progress of the malaise and the disordered toilet. The diabolical machine finally stops, then soon starts again, with a new cargo of passengers who are often the same as in previous series…

Brutality is now fashionable, and even de rigueur, even in pleasures deemed innocent but which are sometimes singularly perverse. It seems that our era could no longer taste anything but the acute intoxication of hysterics, the agitations of epileptics. Ah! How far away are the old funfair games, which our adolescence considered bold and whose timid audacity scandalized the mothers of our little cousins!...

PAUL MATHIEX.