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Explaining the Points of the Harness. Photo by V. Gribayédoff.

M. Pernette's overcoat and top hat are meant to exemplify correct dress for a Paris cab driver. The largest companies provided uniforms, but even the shabbiest of drivers usually wore a top hat as a kind of badge of the trade.

Source:
Outing magazine, vol. XLIII no. 3, December, 1903, p. 250.

Vance Thompson's Cab Drivers / 10

The Paris Cabman / 9

"It'll be a hundred francs," said he, "at least a hundred. He may put me down in his will. Why not? I take that fat party to be sentimental. It's evident. That photograph of a woman – that lock of hair – evidently he is still mourning for that good woman and waiting to join her in a better world. Well, if he wants to leave his worldly goods to me"....

'Twas a shop in the rue Valois. Pierre-Marie looked in the window. It was the hairiest window into which he had ever looked. There were pictures under glass of dead women, made cunningly of the dead women's hair; there were crosses and tombstones and flowers and birds made of hair; there were names – "Claudine, eternally mourned" – written in hair on glass; there were hair chains and rings of hair.

"Bon Dieu! de bon Dieu! de bon Dieu!"

He saw his fat bourgeois in the shop and went in. He got a warm welcome.

"You areun brav' homme," said the fat one, "an honest man, and I mean to reward you. Here," said he, "take that."

And he gave Pierre-Marie a watch chain made of yellow hair.

And the yellow-hair chain – to prove this story is no lie – stretches half across Pierre-Marie's waistcoat to this day.