C'était l'époque où les crinolines, les cages d'acier avaient pris leurs proportions les plus extravagantes, et il me semble qu'elle émergeait d'une véritable montgolfière de soie blanche.
It was the age when crinolines, those cages of steel, had taken on the most extravagant proportions, and it seemed to me that she was emerging from a hot-air balloon of white silk.
— Pierre Loti, Prime jeunesse (1919, p 34)
Touching that Pierre Loti, indefatigable voyager and Orientalist, lover of Istanbul, would in his old age depict the outmoded women’s skirts of his youth as hot-air balloons, so that even in a drawing-room, one was still elsewhere, circumnavigating the world and time in 80 days.
Something in that picture reverberates in the little shop on Régiposta utca 14 (14 Old Post Office Street), home of Bomo Art stationery, in its leather-bound journals and exquisitely printed original paper sheets. Surannée, like the pomaded locks of Valentino, or the waltz in a tango; dépassé, like an English rose at the piano, or a gentleman’s monocle; surannée, like the perfume of parchment maps, the gentle folds of a silken bow; dépassé, like skating on a frozen lake in the snow.
Spinning the praxinoscope in the shop round, a child hovers over its rotating mirrors to glimpse a neatly trimmed corseted lady walk up and down a flight of stairs. Kaleidoscopes wrapped in embossed prints of painted birds and animals, compasses and astrolabes, lilacs and lavender, line the shelves above her, by drawers full of watercolor postcards with calligraphic greetings.
But by far the most charming print adorning journals, boxes and gift card sets is of a painting of hot-air balloons hovering over Budapest, like women’s crinoline skirts spread full in a magnificent ballroom.
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