The most notorious of these ticketed parties was the bal des victimes, held on the first floor of the Hôtel Richelieu, to which only those who had lost a near relative during the Terror were invited. The room was draped in black: black ribbons tied on to the musicians’ violins, black hangings on the walls, black crêpe on the chandeliers. Dancers of both sexes had their hair cut short at the back, à la victime; women wore thin shifts like the ones in which their mothers and sisters had gone to the scaffold, and narrow red ribbons around their necks, as if to show where the guillotine’s blade
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