Charles-Édouard Boutibonne, French
A Croquet Match Between the Sisters of Edgeworth Manor, Two of Whom Showed Up Drunk, 1871
Oil on panel
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Info, or links that perhaps point to more info, about this artist can be found here, here (archived if necessary), and here (if truncated, can be read in full for free on Fridays), perhaps in addition to what’s in his Wikipedia page (Google translated French Wikipedia page has more).
/// Croquet Players found bashing balls boring,
so the regular rules they’re ignoring.
To have won, one must show
just how low she can go.
Limbo under a mallet for scoring.
/// While her friends were distracted with banter,
Lisette sipped from a crystal decanter.
Limbo left her defeated,
so she secretly cheated,
holding on to the side of a planter.
/// Playing croquet while drunk is the ticket,
thought Lisette while the girls watched the wicket.
Very low down she slipped,
then her mallet she gripped.
If they laughed, she knew just where she’d stick it.
/// Roxanne, (wearing red), wanted to win.
By their rules, cheating wasn’t a sin
if nobody could know.
When Lisette limboed low,
Roxanne struck the girl hard in her shin.
/// “Here’s my chance to win,” Roxanne was thinking,
when she heard Lisette’s ice cubes start clinking.
“While she’s feeling no pain,
I will strike and explain
that she fell down because she’s been drinking.”
/// Kneeling down is the right thing to do
when your shot needs a good up-close view.
Bend your head way down low;
get the angle just so.
Use the mallet stick like a pool cue.
/// Four hot sisters’ male friends would amuse them.
Should strange men encroach, sisters refuse them.
If a man still pursues
he is likely to bruise;
they have mallets and know where to use them.
/// The four sisters had each married well,
but they still looked for ways to excel.
Each determined to win—
would some heads get bashed in?
With this psycho clan, none can foretell.
/// Eldest sister was clobbered and downed.
She awoke on the lawn, looked around.
Held in place, she soon found
neck and limbs were all bound
by five wickets knocked deep in the ground.