There was a wonderful variety of costume to be seen and studied among the persons around me, […] other soldiers in helmets and jackboots; French officers of various uniform; monks and priests; attendants, in old-fashioned and gorgeous livery; […] so that, in any other country, the scene might have been taken for a fancy ball.
1858 February 19 (date written), Nathaniel Hawthorne, “February 19th ”, in Passages from the French and Italian Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, volume I, London: Strahan & Co., […], published 1871, page 98