Searching for your partner - Antwerp 1847

1840s Evening Dress

   To a ball in the Rue des Fagots. Antwerp in full dress, promenading, observing, card-playing, and dancing, in a long suite of rooms.

The fete was gay and brilliant. The elaborate system in vogue here of pre-engaging partners and vis-&-vis, proved itself however, an unequivocal nuisance. They had to be hunted up sometimes, from one end to the other of the crowded rooms, and it became positively a hard and anxious labour. It was amusing to watch a man rushing about in desperate haste, searching right and left for his next lady, like a dog in a fair seeking his master, with an impatient and troubled expression of face, in which one read, as plainly as if the words had been written there in large letters :—" Where on earth has she put herself ?—Oh those fiddlers!" 

(Antwerp. A Journal kept there. London: John Olivier, 1847. p. 65.)