The Cloven Foot by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

About this time there appeared among the multifarious placard which adorned the dead walls and hoardings and railway arches and waste spaces of London one mystical dissyllable, which was to be seen everywhere.

Chicot. In gigantic yellow capitals on a black ground. The dullest eye must needs see it, the slowest mind must needs be stirred with vague wonder. Chicot! What did it mean? Was it a name or a thing? A common or a proper noun? Something to eat or something to wear? A quack medicine for humanity, or an ointment to cure the cracked heels of horses? Was it a new vehicle, a patent cab destined to supersede the world-renowned Hansom, or a new machine for cutting up turnips and mangold-wurzel? Was it the name of a new periodical? Chicot! There was something taking in the sound. Two short, crisp syllables, tripping lightly off the tongue. Chicot! The street arabs shouted the word as a savage cry, neither knowing nor caring what it meant. But before those six-sheet posters had lost their pristine freshness most of the fast young men about London, the medical students and articled clerks, the dapper gentlemen at the War Office, the homelier youths from Somerset House, the shining-hatted City swells who came westward as the sun sloped to his rest, knew all about Chicot. Chicot was Mademoiselle Chicot, premiere danseuse at the Royal Prince Frederick Theatre and Music-hall, and she was, according to the highest authorities on the Stock Exchange and in the War Office, quite the handsomest woman in London. Her dancing was distinguished for its audacity rather than for high art. She was no follower of the Taglioni school of saltation. The grace, the refinement, the chaste beauties of that bygone age were unknown to her. She would have ‘mocked herself of you' if you had talked to her about the poetry of motion. But for flying bounds across the stage -- for wild pirouettings on tiptoe -- for the free use of the loveliest arms in creation -- for a bold backward curve of a full white throat more perfect than ever sculptor gave his marble bacchanal, La Chicot was unrivalled.