A sumptuous, luxuriously illuminated ball-room; a multitude of
cavaliers and ladies.
All faces are animated, all speeches are brisk.... A rattling
conversation is in progress about a well-known songstress. The people
are lauding her as divine, immortal.... Oh, how finely she had executed
her last trill that evening!
And suddenly--as though at the wave of a magic wand--from all the heads,
from all the faces, a thin shell of skin flew off, and instantly there
was revealed the whiteness of skulls, the naked gums and cheek-bones
dimpled like bluish lead.
With horror did I watch those gums and cheek-bones moving and
stirring,--those knobby, bony spheres turning this way and that, as they
gleamed in the light of the lamps and candles, and smaller spheres--the
spheres of the eyes bereft of sense--rolling in them.
I dared not touch my own face, I dared not look at myself in a mirror.
But the skulls continued to turn this way and that, as before.... And
with the same clatter as before, the brisk tongues, flashing like red
rags from behind the grinning teeth, murmured on, how wonderfully, how
incomparably the immortal ... yes, the immortal songstress had executed
her last trill!
April, 1878.