ANECDOTES OF LIFE IN DENVER
No story of Eugene Field's life would be true, no study of his
personality complete, if it ignored or even glossed over "the mad wild
ways of his youthful days" in Denver. He never wearied of telling of
the constant succession of harum-scarum pranks that made the Tribune
office the storm-centre for all the fun-loving characters in Colorado.
Not that Field ever neglected his work or his domestic duties for play,
but it was a dull day for Denver when his pen or his restless spirit
for mischief did not provide some fresh cause for local amazement or
merriment. His associates and abettors in all manner of frolics, where
he was master of the revels, were kindred spirits among the railway
managers, agents, politicians, mining speculators, lawyers, and doctors
of the town. Into this company a fresh ingredient would be introduced
every week from the theatrical troupes which made Denver the western
limit of their circuits or a convenient break in the long overland
jump.
Field's office was a fitting retreat for the genius of disorder. It had
none of the conveniences that are supposed to be necessary in the rooms
of modern managing editors. It was open and accessible to the public
without the intermediary of an office-boy or printer's devil. Field had
his own way of making visitors welcome, whether they came in friendly
guise or on hostile measures bent. Over his desk hung the inhospitable
sign, "This is my busy day," which he is said to have invented, and on
the neighboring wall the motto, "God bless our proof-reader, He can't
call for him too soon." But his crudest device, "fatal," as his friend
E.D. Cowen writes, "to the vengeance of every visitor who came with a
threat of libel suit, and temporarily subversive of the good feeling of
those friends he lured into its treacherous embrace, was a bottomless
black-walnut chair." Its yawning seat was always concealed by a few
exchanges carelessly thrown there--the floor being also liberally
strewn with them. As it was the only chair in the room except the one
Field occupied himself, his caller, though never asked to do so, would
be sure to see in Field's suave smile an invitation to drop into the
trap and thence ingloriously to the floor. Through this famous chair,
on his first visit to the Tribune office, "Bill" Nye dropped into a
lifelong friendship with Eugene Field. When the victim happened to be
an angry sufferer from a too personal reference to his affairs in the
paper, Field would make the most profuse apologies for the scant
furnishings of the office, which he shrewdly ascribed to the poverty of
the publishing company, and tender his own chair as some small
compensation for the mishap.
I have spoken of Edgar W.--more familiarly known as "Bill"--Nye's
unceremonious introduction to Field's friendship. This followed upon
what was virtually the discovery of Nye by Field. The former was what
old-time printers described as "plugging along" without recognition on
the Laramie Boomerang. His peculiar humor caught the attention of
Field, who, with the intuition of a born journalist, wrote and got Nye
to contribute a weekly letter to the Tribune. At first Nye was paid the
princely stipend of $5 a week for these letters. This was raised to
$10, and when Field informed Nye that he was to receive $15 per letter,
the latter promptly packed his grip and took the first train for
Denver, to see what sort of a newspaper Croesus presided over the
order-blank of the Tribune. When he appeared before Field he was
whiskered like a western farmer and his head had not pushed its way
through a thick growth of hair. He was altogether a different looking
personage from the bald-headed, clean-shaven humorist with whose
features the world was destined to become so well acquainted.
After the incident of the chair nothing would do Field but a dinner at
the St. James Hotel, given in honor of Bill Nye. The affair started
after the Tribune had gone to press and lasted all night. At five
o'clock in the morning the company escorted their guest to his room and
departed, with elaborate professions of good-will. They waited in the
hotel office long enough for Nye to get to bed, and then sent up cards,
requesting his presence down-stairs on immediate business. But Nye was
equal to his tormentors, and the bell-boy returned, bearing a shot-gun,
with the message that it would speak for him. When Nye first visited
Field in Chicago, his presence in town was heralded with the following
paragraph:
The latest news from Bill Nye is to the effect that he has discovered
a coal mine on his little farm near Hudson, Wis. Ten days ago he
was spading over his garden--an exercise recommended by his
physician--and he struck a very rich vein of what is called rock
coal. Nye paid $2,000 for this farm, and since the development of
this coal deposit on the premises he has been offered $10,000 for
five acres. He believes that he has a great fortune within his grasp.
As illustrative of how impossible it was for Field to keep money, it is
related that on one occasion he coaxed F.J.V. Skiff, then business
manager of the Tribune, to advance "just another" $10 to meet some
urgent domestic demands. Scarcely had Mr. Skiff time to place the order
in the cash drawer, ere Field stood before him once more, pleading
_in forma pauperis_ for "another X." He was asked what had become
of the ten he had just received.
"Just my luck, Fred," Field replied. "As I was leaving the office whom
should I meet but one of my old printer boys, dead broke. The X was all
I had, and he told me he had to have it, and he had to." It is needless
to say that Field got the second advance and succeeded in dodging all
impecunious "old boys" on the way home.
I have said that Denver at that time was the centre of all the railway
interests of Colorado and the far West. Being also the capital, it was
the place where legislators and railway agents wrestled with problems
of regulating tariffs and granting privileges to what may be called
their mutual benefit. It was from his experience in Denver that Field
learned that two-thirds of the business of a western legislature
consisted in causing legislative hold-ups, of which the transportation
companies were the victims, and the most vociferously impeccable
statesmen the chief beneficiaries. The secret service funds of the
railway companies doing business in Colorado paid out a hundred dollars
for protection from notorious sandbagging bills and resolutions to
every dollar they spent for special favors in grants and franchises.
This by way of preface to a story in which Eugene Field and a railway
official, who, as I write, holds a high position in the transportation
world, figure. This official was at that time the superintendent of the
Southwestern Division of the Pullman system, with head-quarters at St.
Louis. In those days every session of the Colorado legislature saw its
anti-Pullman rate reduction bill, which Wickersham, as I shall call
him, because that is not his name, was commissioned to checkmate,
strangle, or make away with in committee by the aid of annual passes,
champagne, and the mysterious potency of the national bank-note. As was
remarked by E.D. Cowen, to whose notes I am indebted for refreshing my
memory of Field's tales, Wickersham never failed in generalship,
principally because he was bold in his methods and picturesquely lavish
with his munitions of war. The Pullman Company did not then enjoy the
royalty and defensive alliance which now protects it against rate
legislation throughout the West, and so Wickersham was kept continually
on the go, making alliances and friendships among legislators and
journalists against the days of reckoning.
Field, as the managing editor of the Tribune, was a special favorite
with Wickersham, as he was of every professional and commercial visitor
having an axe to grind at the capital of the state. Pullman's
representative had the wit to appreciate Field, both for his personal
qualities and the assistance he could render through the columns of the
newspaper. Field reciprocated the personal friendship, but, so far as
the Tribune was concerned, took a grim satisfaction in giving
Wickersham to understand that though he could use its freedom he could
not abuse it or count upon its aid beyond what was strictly legitimate.
Field's stereotyped introduction of Wickersham--one calculated to put
him on a pleasant business footing with every practical politician, was
"He's a good fellow and a thoroughbred." So his coming was invariably
celebrated by a general round-up of all the good fellows in Denver, and
his departure left the aching heads and parched recollections that from
the days of Noah have distinguished the morning after.
After one of Wickersham's calls, Field determined that the sobriety and
severe morality of Denver were being scandalized by these periodical
visitations, and he issued orders to the Tribune staff that when next
the "good fellow and thoroughbred" appeared on the scene he should be
given a wide berth, or, as Field put it, should be left to "play a lone
hand in his game." So when Wickersham next swung around the legislative
circle to Denver, not a man about the editorial rooms would go out with
him, listen to his stories, accept a cigar at his hands, or associate
with him in any of the ways that had been their cheerful wont. The
coldness and loneliness of the situation excited Wickersham's thirst
for revenge and also for what is known as the wine of Kentucky. Having
succeeded in getting up a full head of steam, he started out for an
explanation or a counter demonstration. Arriving at the Tribune office,
when the desks were vacated at the evening dinner-hour, he interpreted
it as a further affront and challenge, which he proceeded to answer by
destroying every last scrap of copy in sight for the morrow's paper. He
then converted himself into a small cyclone, and went through every
desk, strewed their litter on the floor, broke all the pens and
pencils, and, in the language of an eye-witness, "ended by toning the
picture of editorial desolation with the violet contents of all the ink
bottles he could find."
Then he retired in hilarious satisfaction from the scene of devastation
he had made. Consternation reigned in that office until Field returned,
when he quickly dispelled the gloom with a promise of revenge, and set
the staff at work to patch up the ruin the envious Wickersham had made.
But they were not permitted to do this in peace, for their enemy,
returning in the dark of night, bombarded the windows of the editorial
rooms with the staves of old ash-barrels he had found conveniently by.
While Wickersham was engaged in this second assault, with windows
smashing to right of them and to left of them, with glass falling all
around them, and the staves of old ash-barrels playing a devil's tattoo
about them, the devoted band of editors, reporters, and copy-readers
worked nobly on. They had confidence in their leader that their hour
would come. Their first duty was to get out the paper. After that they
looked for the deluge.
When Wickersham had expended his last stave and fiercest epithet on the
shattered windows he retired in bad order to his apartments at the St.
James Hotel.
Now began Field's revenge, planned with due deliberation and executed
with malicious thoroughness. He first sent for "'Possum Jim," an aged
and very serious colored man, who worshipped "Mistah Fiel'" because of
the sympathy Eugene never withheld from the dark-skinned children of
the race. "'Possum Jim" spent most of his existence on the same street
corner, waiting for a job, which invariably had to come to him. His
outfit consisted of an express wagon strung together with telegraph
wire, and a nondescript four-footed creature that once bore the
similitude of a horse. Whenever Field had an odd job to be done about
his household he would go out of his way to let "old 'Possum Jim" earn
the quarter--partly to do an act of kindness to "Jim," but chiefly to
tease Mrs. Field by the appearance of the broken-down equipage
lingering in front of their dwelling.
Just before the Tribune went to press, a sergeant of police called on
Field in response to a summons by telephone. After a whispered
conference he left, with a broad smile struggling under his curling
mustache. In company with a number of his staff Field next made the
round of the all-night haunts and gathered to his aid as fine a
collection of bohemian "thoroughbreds" as ever made the revels of Mardi
Gras look like a Sunday-school convention. He installed them at the
resort of a Kentucky gentleman named Jones, opposite the St. James. As
one who was there reports, "The amber milk of the Blue-grass cow flowed
in plenty." Bidding his associates await his return, Field, armed with
a single bottle, crossed the street to the hotel in search of the
enemy.
For half, an hour they waited, in growing fear that Wickersham had
retired for the night, with orders the night clerk dared not disobey,
that he was not to be disturbed, even if the hotel was on fire. Just as
expectation had grown heavy-eyed, Field appeared crossing the street
with Wickersham on his arm, very happy, more of a good fellow than ever
and more than ever ready for red-eyed anarchy of any sort.
"After a swift hour"--I quote from one who was there and whose account
tallies with Field's own--"and as the morning opened out Field insisted
on breaking for sunlight and fresh air. Wickersham was always a leader,
even in the matter of making a noise. He sang; everyone else applauded.
He shrieked and shouted; all approved. Windows went up across the way
in the hotel, and night-capped heads protruded to investigate. The
frantic din of the electric-bells could be heard. The clerk appeared to
protest." What attention might have been paid to his protest will never
be known, for just then "'Possum Jim's" gothic steed and rattletrap
cart rounded the corner.
"I say, old man," shouted Field, "we want your rig for an hour; what's
it worth?"
Jim played his part slyly, and the bargain was finally struck for
$2.50, the owner to present no claim for possible damages. Wickersham
was so delighted with the shrewdness of the deal that he insisted on
paying the bill. The horse, which could scarcely stand on his four
corners, was quickly unharnessed and hitched to a telegraph pole, and
before he realized what the madcaps were about, Wickersham was himself
harnessed into the shafts. The novelty of his position suited his mood.
He pranced and snorted, and pawed the ground and whinnied, and played
horse in fine fettle until the word go. Field, with a companion beside
him, held the reins and cracked the whip. The others helped the
thoroughbred in harness the best they could by pushing.
In this manner, and all yelling like Comanche Indians, twice they made
the circuit of the block. All the guests in front of the big hotel were
leaning out of the windows, when the police sergeant popped in sight
with a squad of four men. Field, who had been duly apprised of their
approach, gave the signal, and the crowd, making good their retreat to
Jones's, abandoned Wickersham to his fate. He was quickly, but roughly,
disentangled from the intricacies of "'Possum Jim's" rope-yarn harness.
The more he protested and expostulated, the more inexorable became the
five big custodians of the outraged peace, until the last word of
remonstrance and explanation died upon his well-nigh breathless lips.
Then he tried cajoling and "connudling" and those silent, persuasive
arts so often efficacious in legislative lobbies; but there were too
many witnesses to his crime, and bribes were not in order.
When at last Wickersham, from sheer despair and physical exhaustion,
sank limp in the arms of his captors, the sergeant, on the pretext of
seeking the aiders and abettors in the riot, half carried, half led the
prisoner into Jones's resort.
A quarter of an hour later the police squad made its exit by the back
door, and less than an hour afterward Wickersham's special was bearing
him southward toward Texas.
But Field's revenge was not fully sated yet. He caused a $2 Pullman
rate-bill, making a sixty per cent. reduction, to be prepared in the
Tribune office, and secured its introduction in the legislature by the
chairman of the House committee on railways. The news was immediately
flashed East, and Wickersham came posting back to Denver with the worst
case of monopoly fright he had ever experienced. The day after his
arrival the Tribune had something to say in every department of his
nefarious mission, and every reference to him bristled with biting
irony and downright accusation. Never was a "good fellow and a
thoroughbred" so mercilessly scarified.
For the remaining six weeks of the session Wickersham did not leave
Denver, nor did he dare look at the Tribune until after breakfast.
Every member of the legislature received a Pullman annual. Champagne
flowed, not by the bottle, but by the dray-load. Wickersham begged for
quarter, but his appeals fell like music on ears that heard but heeded
not. Nor did he find out that the whole affair was a put-up job until
the bill was finally lost in the Senate committee.
One of the familiar stories of Field's rollicking life in Denver was at
the expense of Oscar Wilde, then on his widely advertised visit to
America. As the reader may remember, this was when the aesthetic craze
and the burlesques inseparable from it were at their height.
Anticipating Wilde's appearance in Denver by one day, and making
shrewdly worded announcements through the Tribune in keeping with his
project, Field secured the finest landau in town and was driven through
the streets in a caricature verisimilitude of the poet of the sunflower
and the flowing hair.
The impersonation of Wilde à la Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan's
opera, "Patience," was well calculated to deceive all who were not in
the secret. Field's talent as a farceur and a mimic enabled him to
assume and carry out the expression of bored listlessness which was the
popular idea of the leader of aesthetes. Nobody in the curious,
whooping, yelling crowd assembled along the well-advertised route
suspected the delusion, and after an hour's parade Field succeeded in
making his exit from public gaze without betraying his identity.
When Wilde turned up the next day he was not a little mystified to
learn that he had created a sensation driving around Denver in the
raiments of Bunthorne, while in reality travelling over the prairie in
a palace-car. It was Field himself who relieved his curiosity with a
highly amusing narrative of the experience of the joker lounging in the
seat of honor in the landau.
Wilde, it is related, saw nothing funny in the affair, nor was he
provoked at it. His only comment was, "What a splendid advertisement
for my lecture."
It was while in Denver that Field had numerous and flattering offers to
leave journalism for the stage, and more than once he was sorely
tempted to make the experiment. In the natural qualifications for the
theatrical profession he was most richly endowed. In the arts of
mimicry he had no superior. He had the adaptable face of a comedian,
was a matchless raconteur, and a fine vocalist. At a banquet or in a
parlor he was an entertainer of truly fascinating parts. During his
life in St. Louis and Kansas City his inclination had led him to seek
the society of the green-room, and in Denver his position enlarged the
circle of his acquaintance with the theatrical profession, until it
embraced almost every prominent actor and actress in America, and was
subsequently extended to include the more celebrated artists of
England. Among his favorites was Madame Bernhardt, whose several visits
to the United States afforded him an opportunity for some of the most
entertaining sketches that ever delighted his Chicago readers. None of
these contained more pith in little than that brief paragraph with
which he opened his column one day, to the effect that "An empty cab
drove up to the stage-door of the Columbia Theatre last night, from
which Madame Bernhardt alighted."
Among the celebrities who visited Denver while Field was in what he
would have called his perihelion was Miss Kate Field, with whose name
he took all the liberties of a brother, although there was no blood
relationship between them thicker than the leaves of a genealogical
compendium. He took especial pains to circulate the report through all
the West that Miss Field had brought a sitz-bath with her to alleviate
the dust and hardships of travel in the "Woolly West," where, as he
represented, she thought running water was a luxury and stationary
bath-tubs were unknown. But he atoned for this by one of the daintiest
pleasantries that ever occurred to his playful mind. When Miss Field
was preparing for her lecture tour in Mormon land she started an
inquisitive correspondence with her namesake, whose Tribune Primer was
then spreading his fame through the exchanges. The two soon discovered
that they were cousins, no matter how many times removed, but near
enough to inspire Field to entrust a letter to Uncle Sam's mail
addressed thus:
_A maiden fair of untold age
Seeks to adorn our Western stage;
How foolish of her, yet how nice
To write me, asking my advice!
New York's the city where you'll find
This prodigy of female kind;
Hotel Victoria's the place
Where you'll see her smiling face.
I pray thee, postman, bear away
This missive to her, sans delay.
These lines enclosed are writ by me--
A Field am I, a Field is she.
Two very fertile fields I ween,
In constant bloom, yet never green,
She is my cousin; happy fate
That gave me such a Cousin Kate._
From Denver to New York this pretty conceit carried the epistle just as
safely and directly as if it had borne the most prosaic superscription
the postal authorities could exact, and I venture to say that it was
handled with a smiling solicitude never bestowed on the humdrum
epistles that travel neither faster nor surer for being marked
"important and immediate." This was before Field had formed the habit
of illuminating everything he wrote with colored inks, or the missive
to his Cousin Kate would have expressed his variegated fancies in all
the colors of the rainbow, especially red.
In a short sketch, entitled "Eugene Field in Denver," Wolfe Londoner
speaks of his friend as a "bright ray of laughing sunshine across this
shadowy vale, a mine of sentiment and charity, an avalanche of fun and
happiness," but one who "never in all the run of his merry, joyous
career was known to wake up with a cent." Why?
Here is the explanation given by Mr. Londoner, who was familiar with
every phase of Eugene Field's life in Denver:
"The course of one short day was ever long enough to drain his open
purse, and his boon companions were as welcome to its contents, while
it could stand the strain, as its careless, happy owner. The bright
side of life attracted his laughing fancy, and with stern and
unalterable determination he studiously avoided all seriousness and
shadow. There was no room in his happy composition for aught of sorrow
or sadness, and a quick and merry wit always extricated him from every
embarrassing position or perplexing dilemma."
Mr. Londoner rightly says that an inert Eugene Field was an
impossibility, and at that time he was only supremely happy when
busily engaged in playing some practical joke on his ever-suspecting
but never sufficiently wary friends. Of course Mr. Londoner himself
was victimized, and more than once. During one campaign, as chairman
of the Republican County Central Committee, Mr. Londoner was delegated
to work up enthusiasm among the colored voters of Denver, and in an
unguarded moment he took Field into his confidence and boasted of his
flattering progress. The next morning the following advertisement,
displayed with all the prominence of glaring scare-heads, appeared:
WANTED!!
EVERY COLORED MAN IN THE CITY.
To call at Wolfe Londoner's Store.
A Car load of Georgia Watermelons
Just received For a special distribution
Among his Colored Friends.
_Call Early and get Your Melon!!!_
It is needless to say that when Mr. Londoner's store opened in the
morning an ever-increasing cloud of dusky humanity, with teeth that
glistened with the juice of anticipation, gathered about the entrance.
Business in the store was at a standstill and travel on the street was
blocked. No explanation could appease the rising anger of that dark
multitude. It was melons, or a riot. Melons, or that unheard-of
thing--a colored landslide to the democracy. Mr. Londoner was at his
wits' ends. There were no melons in the market, and none expected.
Just as Londoner was preparing to abandon his store to the wrath of
the justly incensed melon-maniacs, a car-load of magnificent melons
dropped into one of the freight sidings, and Londoner and the
Republican party were saved. Nobody ever knew how or whence that
pink-hearted manna came. The price was exorbitant, but that did not
matter. Londoner paid it with the air of a man who had ordered melons
and was indignant that the railway company had disappointed him in not
delivering them the day before. There was not a crack in the solid
black Republican column on election day.
But Field was not through with Mr. Londoner yet. The colored brethren
had to hold their ratification meeting to endorse the Republican
nominations, and more especially to render thanks for the creation of
watermelons, and to the man who paid for them, out of season. Of
course Mr. Londoner was invited to attend, and when it came his turn
to address the meeting the chairman, a colored deacon of the church
where "'Possum Jim" worshipped, by the name of Williams, introduced
him as follows:
"I now take great pleasure in introducing to you our friend and
brother, the Honorable Mistah Wolfe Londoner, who has always been our
true friend and brother, who always advises us to do the right thing,
and stands ready, at all times, to help us in the good fight. Although
he has a white skin, his heart is as black as any of ours. Brothers,
the Honorable Wolfe Londoner."
There was no mistaking the authorship of this felicitous introduction.
Field was never tired of repeating another story at the expense of Mr.
Londoner, in connection with the visit of Charles A. Dana to Denver.
The arrival of "Mr. Dana of the New York Sun" was made the occasion
for one of those receptions by the Press Club which made up in
heartiness what they lacked in conventional ceremony. Mr. Londoner was
the president of the club, and it not only fell to his lot to deliver
the address of welcome to guests of the club, but to look after their
comfort and welfare while they remained in the city, and often to
provide them with the wherewithal to leave it. On Mr. Dana's
presentation he was called on for some remarks, to which Mr. Londoner
listened with the air of a man who had heard the same tale from lips
less entitled to deliver a message of counsel and warning to a group
of newspaper writers. When his guest had finished his remarks, Mr.
Londoner, according to Field's story, walked over to Mr. Dana and
asked him how much he wanted.
Mr. Dana looked at him with a puzzled air, and asked: "How much what?
What do you mean?"
"Why, money," Mr. Londoner is said to have replied. "Every newspaper
man who ever came to this club was introduced the same as you were,
made a speech the same as you did, and then came to me to borrow money
to get out of town with. Now, how much do you want?"
According to Field, he never saw a man so greatly relieved as Mr.
Londoner was when Mr. Dana assured him that his hotel bill was paid
and he had enough money sewed into his waistcoat to carry him back to
New York, where he had a job waiting for him.
On one occasion Field accompanied the Denver Press Club on a pleasure
trip to Manitou, a summer resort that nestles in a cañon at the base
of Mount Rosa. Before the party was comfortably settled in the hotel,
Field was approached by a poor woman who had lost her husband, and who
poured into his ear a sad tale of indigence and sorrow. He became
immediately interested, and at once set about devising means for her
relief. As his purse was as lean as her own and his companions were
not overburdened with the means to get back to Denver, he announced a
grand musical and dramatic entertainment, to be given in the parlors
of the hotel that evening, for the benefit of a deserving charity.
Every guest in the hotel was invited, and the members of the Press
Club spread the notices among the citizens of the village. When asked
who would be the performers, Field answered, with the utmost
nonchalance, that the Lord would provide the entertainment if Manitou
would furnish the audience. The evening came, and the parlors were
crowded with guests and villagers, but no performers. After waiting
until expectancy and curiosity had almost toppled over from tiptoe to
disgust and indignation, Field stepped to the piano with preternatural
gravity and attacked it with all the grand airs of a foreign virtuoso.
Critics would have denied that Field was a pianist, and, technically
considered, they would have been right. But his fingers had a fondness
for the ivory keys, and they responded to his touch with the sweet
melody of the forest to the wind. He carried all the favorite airs of
all the operas he had ever heard in his fingers' ends. He knew the
popular songs of the day by heart, and, where memory failed, could
improvise. He had a voice for the soft and deep chords of negro
melodies I have never heard surpassed, and with all, he had a command
of comedy and pathos which, up to this time, was little known beyond
the circle in Denver over which he reigned as the Lord of Misrule.
That night in Manitou those who were present reported that, from the
moment he sat down at the piano until the last note of the good-night
song died away, he held that impromptu audience fascinated by his
impromptu performance. By turns he sang, played, recited poetry,
mimicked actors and well-known Colorado characters, told anecdotes,
and altogether gave such a single-handed entertainment that the
spectators did not know whether to be more astonished at its variety
or delighted with its genius. The result was a generous collection,
which went far to relieve the distress of the woman who had touched
Field's sympathy.
Let it not be understood that nothing more serious than some hilarious
escapade or sardonic bit of humor ever crossed the life of Eugene
Field in Denver. His innate hatred of humbug and sham made the Denver
Tribune a terror to all public characters who considered that suddenly
acquired wealth gave them a free hand to flaunt ostentatious vulgarity
on all public occasions.