The Kalmucks, or Kalmiks, are a Mongolian people settled between the Don and the Volga, and also in Siberia.
19
The Bal Mabille was, in 1813, a drinking spot in the fields around the Champs-Elysees, run by a former dancing master named Mabille. It had great success and grew to great proportions under Mabille’s sons. The dancer Rigolboche (Marguerite Badel) created the cancan there in 1845. The Bal disappeared in 1875.
20
The Palais Royal was originally the palace of Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642). Before his death, he willed it to Louis XIII and his direct descendants, and in 1643 the widowed queen, Anne d’Autriche, moved to it from the Louvre with her two sons, Louis XIV and Philippe d’Orleans, aged five and three, thus making it the royal palace. In 1781–4, the central garden was surrounded on three sides by the present four-story structure, with 180 arcades on the ground floor containing some sixty shops, which were rented out to merchants.
21
The tragic poet Jean Racine (1639–99) is considered to have perfectly realized the ideal of French classical tragedy. In an early letter to his brother Mikhail, Dostoevsky passionately defended Racine against the sort of criticism Alexei Ivanovich offers here.
22
The statue of Apollo in the Vatican Museum, a Roman copy of a Greek original, was once considered the model of male sculptural beauty.
