"Bouffe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the waltz the floor is promptly cleared again. One woman puts her hand on the rail-fence and leaps over unconcernedly, rather than take her turn at the gate. Then the band strikes up the opening strain of the popular opera-bouffe quadrille of the hour, and the air echoes with the shout on every side, "C'est Angot! C'est Angot!" and the struggle for places is furious. "Madame Angot," the heroine of a fashionable opera-bouffe, is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... worst. [The Prince making passes in the air, tierce and thrust with his cane at an imaginary foe] I say, dear Prince, tell me the worst—I think I can bear it. [Helene is almost amused by the sight of the semi-comic opera-bouffe ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... was the bearer of a dossier in which it was gravely recited that Captain Briggs and I had been arrested while in the company of a person calling himself Donald Thompson, who was charged by the chief of staff with having smiled and smoked a cigar in his presence. Needless to say, the whole opera-bouffe affair was promptly disavowed by the higher authorities. I have mentioned the incident because it was the sole occasion on which I met with so much as a shadow of discourtesy from any Belgian, either soldier or civilian. ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... induced in him a Frenchified—but most un-French—cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority. Of his own country he used to say to his French associates: "Imagine an atmosphere of opera-bouffe in which all the comic business of stage statesmen, brigands, etc., etc., all their farcical stealing, intriguing, and stabbing is done in dead earnest. It is screamingly funny, the blood flows all the time, and the actors believe themselves to be influencing the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... OPERA BOUFFE, an opera in an extravagant burlesque style, with characters, music, and other accompaniments to match; is the creation of OFFENBACH (q. v.), his more distinguished successors in the production of which have ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... matters follows the English pretty closely. Opera-bouffe and Gilbert and Sullivan are preferred to everything else. Next in popularity is the 'New Babylon' type of play. Low comedy also draws well; and I have often wondered that Mr. Toole has not paid us a ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... sat at the piano trying to pick out a tune from an opera bouffe, and Jean, perched uncomfortably on the edge of his chair, stared about the room at a host of strange and sumptuous objects that seemed in some mysterious way to be part and parcel of their beautiful owner, and affected him almost as strangely as ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... certain Wednesday of the present year, after enjoying the excellent acting of Bouffe in two of his best characters, I paused a moment to speak to a friend in the crowded lobby of the St James's Theatre. Whilst thus engaged, I became aware that I was an object of attention to two persons, whom I had an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... him, he was in a towering rage. With a body of his troops and one small cannon, he marched to Tipton's house and besieged it, threatening a bombardment. He did not, however, fire into the dwelling, though he placed some shots about it and in the extreme corners. This opera bouffe siege endured for several days, until Tipton was reinforced by some of his own clique. Then Tipton sallied forth and attacked the besiegers, who hastily scattered rather than engage in a sanguinary fight with their neighbors. Tipton captured Sevier's two elder ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... chocolate-skinned generals in the Caribbean become dissatisfied with their portions of gold lace, the arms- and ammunition-dealers of South Street can give, if they choose, an advance scenario of the whole tragedy or comic opera, as the case may be. Real war or opera-bouffe, it is all grist for the ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... "blessed for receiving mine everlasting covenant," directed him to go forth and preach, gave him power to heal the sick, and then added, "Commit no adultery, a temptation with which thou hast been troubled." Could religious bouffe go to ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... and 'futures'. Of course you remember that he believes in evolution? There was a time, even in my extremely recent day, when that word was more frightful to the orthodox than a ton of nitro-glycerine; was to the elect, a fouler abomination even than opera bouffe and the can can. But 'the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns', and now it appears that the immortal soul of us must be evolved, somewhat in the same fashion as protoplasm, and unless we ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... in khaki, puttees, pongee cap, white-and-green stock, a knapsack on his back, and a bamboo stick under his arm; altogether equipped to such a high point of pedestrianism that a cynical person might have been reminded of loud calls for wine at some hostelry in the land of opera bouffe. He was speaking fluently, though with a detestable accent, in a rough-and-ready, pick-up dialect of Parisian slang, evidently under the pleasant delusion that he employed the French language, while Pere Baudry contributed his share of the conversation ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... tragedy, comedy, opera, vaudeville, comedietta^, lever de rideau [Fr.], interlude, afterpiece^, exode^, farce, divertissement, extravaganza, burletta^, harlequinade^, pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe [Fr.], ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame [Fr.]; melodrama, melodrame^; comidie larmoyante [Fr.], sensation drama; tragicomedy, farcical-comedy; monodrame monologue; duologue trilogy^; charade, proverbs; mystery, miracle play; musical, musical comedy. [movies] western, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... that the chief of police come personally to escort them out and make an apology. In many ways, it seems like an opera bouffe, but there is no doubt that up to date they have shown more shrewdness and policy than the government, and are getting the latter where it is a laughing stock, which is fatal in China. But the government isn't inactive; they have appointed a new Minister of Education and a new ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... absorption. "Come in," he said, in reply to her knock, timidly repeated. She entered fresh and gay, her beautiful arms bared to the elbows, and with so rustic an air that the rice-powder on her face seemed to be the flour from some theatrical mill in an opera bouffe. ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... was the chartering of a yacht for a ten-days' cruise about the bay, or it was a bicycle bought one week and thrown away the next, a fresh suit of clothes each month, gloves worn but once, gold-pieces thrust into Flossie's pockets, suppers given to bouffe actresses—twenty-four-hour acquaintances—a racehorse bought for eight hundred dollars, resold for two hundred and fifty—rings and scarf-pins given away to the women and girls of the Imperial, and a whole world of follies that his ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... terrors of last night seemed a thing far removed from us. We sat at breakfast in our little sitting-room, and as though by common though unspoken consent we treated the whole affair as a gigantic joke. We ignored its darker aspect. We spoke of it as an "opera-bouffe" attempt never likely to be repeated—the hare-brained scheme of a mad foreigner, over anxious to earn the favour of his mistress. But beneath all our light talk was an undernote of seriousness. I think that Mabane and I, at any rate, realized perhaps for the first time that the ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... our standpoint, the thing has a ludicrous bouffe air that makes us smile. But to the boy caught in the toils it was tragic. To work and evolve in an environment of such brutality was impossible to certain temperaments. Success lay in becoming calloused ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... beauty and rich costumes do not make an actress, nor are the efforts of a clever little girl to play great characters real art. It is all dazzle and sham, and a disgrace and disappointment now. Why will the public be satisfied with opera bouffe, or the trash called society plays when a world of truth and beauty, poetry and pathos lies waiting to be interpreted ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... without bowing, and always rose when she entered the room. Mrs. Barker's scant schoolgirl knowledge was touched by this gentleman, who spoke French fluently, and delicately explained to her the libretto of a risky opera bouffe. And now she had finally yielded to a meeting out of San Francisco—and an ostensible visit—still as a speculator—to one or two mining districts—with HER BROKER. This was the boldest of her steps—an original idea of the fashionable Van Loo—which, ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... are the chief entertainment in Burma; the Burmese as a nation delight in plays—operatic, tragic, opera bouffe and ballets, such as the "Han Pwe," when a number of young girls, all dressed as royalties, posture and dance with extreme grace; and as their training is perfect, the entertainment evokes unqualified applause. So interested and absorbed do the audience become in long drawn-out ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... daughter. If he, Rex, had had a sister, would he have liked her to be on a Bavarian mountaintop in a company composed of a gamekeeper, the manager of a Paris theater and his wife, and a young person who was about to make her debut in opera-bouffe, and to have no better guardian than a roving young art student? Rex felt his unfitness for the post with a pang of compunction. Meantime he rubbed his head, and Monsieur Bordier talked tranquilly on. But between ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... that aims merely to entertain—the fiction that is to serious fiction as the opera-bouffe, the ballet, and the pantomime are to the true drama—need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply; but even such fiction will not be gay or trivial to any reader's hurt, and criticism should hold it to account if it passes from painting ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... have come upon our theatre within even the last twenty-five years—by the advent of "the sensation drama," invented and named by Dion Boucicault; by the resuscitation of the spectacle play, with its lavish tinsel and calcium glare and its multitudinous nymphs; by the opera bouffe, with its frequent licentious ribaldry; by the music-hall comedian, with his vulgar realism; and by the idiotic burlesque; with its futile babble and its big-limbed, half-naked girls. Nevertheless there are just as good actors now living as have ever lived, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter |
