Charades

[citation needed] One charade composed by Jane Austen goes as follows: When my first is a task to a young girl of spirit, And my second confines her to finish the piece, How hard is her fate!

[5] Later examples omitted direct references to individual syllables, such as the following, said to be a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt:[citation needed] I talk, but I do not speak my mind I hear words, but I do not listen to thoughts When I wake, all see me When I sleep, all hear me Many heads are on my shoulders Many hands are at my feet The strongest steel cannot break my visage But the softest whisper can destroy me The quietest whimper can be heard.

In the early 20th century, the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica offered these two prose charades as "perhaps as good as could be selected": "My first, with the most rooted antipathy to a Frenchman, prides himself, whenever they meet, upon sticking close to his jacket; my second has many virtues, nor is its least that it gives its name to my first; my whole may I never catch!

Thus the term gradually became more popularly used to refer to acted charades, examples of which are described in William Thackeray's Vanity Fair and in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

[6] Thackeray snarked that charades were enjoyed for "enabling the many ladies amongst us who had beauty to display their charms, and the fewer number who had cleverness, to exhibit their wit".

After refreshments, another round begins, partially in pantomime: the first scene shows a household yawningly finishing a game of cribbage and preparing for bed; the second opens on the household bustling with activity as daybreak prompts bells ringing, arguments over receipts, collection of the chamber pots, calls for carriages, and greetings to new guests; the third closes with a ship's crew and passengers tossed about by a storm with strong winds.

The answer—nightingale—is then (somewhat mistakenly)[a] acted out by Becky in the role of a singing French marquise, recalling both Lacoste's 1705 tragic opera Philomèle and an arriviste lover and wife of Louis XIV.