As for Octavian, he confessed that reality itself had little charm for

him, not because he indulged in student-dreams, all moulded of lilies

and roses like one of Demoustier's madrigals, but because there were too

many prosaic and repulsive details surrounding all beauty, too many

doting and decorated fathers, coquettish mothers who wore natural

flowers in false hair, ruddy-faced cousins meditating proposals,

ridiculous aunts in love with little dogs. An acquatinta engraving after

Horace Vernet or Delaroche, hung up in a woman's room, would have been

sufficient to check a growing passion within him. More poetical even

than amorous, he wanted a terrace on Isola-Bella, in Lake Maggiore,

under the light of a full moon to frame a rendezvous. He would have

wished to elevate his love above the midst of common life, and transport

its scenes to the stars. Thus he had by turns fallen fruitlessly and

madly in love with all the grand feminine types preserved by history or

art. Like Faust, he had loved Helen, and would have wished that the

undulations of the ages might bear to him one of those sublime

personifications of human desires and dreams, whose forms, to mortal

eyes invisible, live immortally beyond Space and Time. He had created

for himself an ideal seraglio, with Semiramis, Aspasia, Cleopatra, Diana

of Poitiers, Jane of Arragon. At times also he had fallen in love with

statues, and one day, passing before the Venus of Milo in the Museum, he

cried out passionately: "Oh, who will restore thy arms that thou may'st

crush me upon thy marble bosom!" At Rome, the sight of a matted mass of

long thick human hair, exhumed from an antique tomb, had thrown him into

a fantastic delirium. He had attempted, through the medium of a few of

those hairs, obtained by a golden bribe from the custodian, and placed

in the hands of a clairvoyant of great power, to evoke the shade and

form of the dead; but the conducting fluid--the subtle odyle--had

evaporated during the lapse of so many years, and the apparition could

no more come forth out of the eternal night.

As Fabio had divined before the glass cabinet in the Studii Museum, the

imprint discovered in the cellar at the villa of Arrius Diomedes had

excited in Octavian wild impulses toward a retrospective ideal. He

longed to soar beyond Life and Time and transport himself in spirit to

the age of Titus.

* * * * *

Max and Fabio retired to their room, and being somewhat heavy-headed

from the classic fumes of the Falernian, were soon sound asleep.

Octavian, who had more than once suffered the full glass to remain

before him untasted, not wishing to disturb by a grosser intoxication

the poetic drunkenness which boiled in his brain, felt from the

agitation of his nerves that sleep would not come to him, and left the

hostelry on tiptoe that he might cool his brow and calm his thoughts in

the night air.

His feet bore him unawares to the entrance which leads into the dead

city. He removed the wooden bar that closed it, and wandered into the

ruins beyond.

The moon illuminated the pale houses with her white beams, dividing the

streets into double-edged lines of silvery white and bluish shadow. This

nocturnal day, with its subdued tints, disguised the degradation of the

buildings. The mutilated columns, the façades streaked with fugitive

lizards, the roofs crumbled in by the eruption, were less noticeable

than when beheld under the clear, raw light of the sun. The lost parts

were completed by the half-tint of shadow, and here and there one

brusque beam of light, like a touch of sentiment in a picture-sketch,

marked where a whole edifice had crumbled away. The silent genii of the

night seemed to have repaired the fossil city for some representation of

fantastic life.

At times Octavian fancied that he saw vague human forms in the shadow,

but they vanished the moment they approached the edge of the lighted

portion of the street. A low whispering, an indefinite hum, floated

through the silence. Our promenader at first attributed them to a

fluttering in his eyes, to a buzzing in his ears; it might even, he

thought, be merely an optical delusion, coupled with the sighing of the

sea-breezes, or the flight of some snake or lizard through the nettles,

for in nature all things live, even death; all things make themselves

heard, even silence. Nevertheless he felt a kind of involuntary terror,

a slight trembling, that might have been caused by the cold night air,

but which made his flesh creep. Could it be that his comrades, actuated

by the same impulses as himself, were seeking him among the ruins? Those

dimly seen forms and those indistinct sounds of footsteps! Might it not

have been only Max and Fabio walking and chatting together, who had just

disappeared round the corner of a cross-road? But Octavian felt to his

dismay that this very natural explanation could not be true, and the

arguments which he made to himself in favor of it were the reverse of

convincing. The solitude and the shadow were peopled with invisible

beings whom he was disturbing. He had fallen into the midst of a

mystery, and it seemed that they were awaiting his departure in order to

commence again. Such were the extravagant ideas that floated through his

brain, and obtained no little verisimilitude from the hour, the place,

and the thousand alarming details which those can well understand who

have ever found themselves alone by night in the midst of some vast

ruin.

Passing before a house which he had attentively observed during the day,

and which the moon shone fully upon, he beheld in perfect integrity a

certain portico whereof he had vainly attempted to restore the design in

fancy. Four Ionic columns--fluted for half their height and their shafts

purple-robed with minium tints--sustained a cymatium adorned with

polychromatic ornaments that the artist seemed only to have completed

the day before. Upon one side wall of the entrance a Laconian molossus,

painted in encaustic, and accompanied by the warning inscription "_Cave

canem_" barked at the moon and the visitor with pictured fury. On the

mosaic threshold the word HAVE, in Oscan and Latin characters, saluted

the guest with its friendly syllables. The outer surfaces of the walls,

tinted with ochre and rubric, were unmarred by a single crack. The house

had grown a story higher; and the tiled roof, now surmounted by a bronze

acroterium, projected an intact outline against the light blue of the

sky, where a few stars were growing pale.

This strange restoration effected between afternoon and evening by some

unknown architect greatly puzzled Octavian, who felt certain of having

the same day seen that very house in a lamentable state of ruin. The

mysterious reconstructor had labored with great despatch, for all the

neighboring dwellings had the same fresh, new look; all the pillars were

coiffed with their capitals; not a single stone, a brick, a pellicle of

stucco or a scale of paint was wanting upon the shining surfaces of the

façades; and through the intervals of the peristyles surrounding the

marble basin of the cavædium one could catch glimpses of white laurels

and bayroses, myrtles and pomegranates. Surely all the historians were

mistaken; the eruption had never taken place, or else the needle of Time

had moved backward twenty secular hours upon the dial of Eternity!

In the climax of his astonishment, Octavian commenced to wonder whether

he might not actually be sleeping upon his feet, and walking in a dream.

He even seriously asked himself whether madness might not be parading

its hallucinations before his eyes; but he soon felt himself compelled

to admit that he was neither asleep nor mad.

A singular change had taken place in the atmosphere. Vague rose-tints

were blending through brightening shades of violet with the faintly

azure tints of moonlight; the sky commenced to glow brightly along its

borders; daylight seemed about to dawn. Octavian took out his watch: it

marked the hour of midnight. Fearing that it might have stopped, he

pressed the spring of the repeating mechanism. It struck twelve times.

It was midnight beyond a doubt, and yet the brightness ever increased.

The moon sank through the azure which became momentarily more and more

luminous. The sun rose!

Then Octavian, to whom all ideas of time had become hopelessly confused,

was able to convince himself that he was walking, not through a dead

Pompeii, the chill corpse of a city half-shrouded, but through a living,

youthful, intact Pompeii over which the torrents of burning mud from

Vesuvius had never flowed.

An inconceivable prodigy had transported him, a Frenchman of the

nineteenth century, back to the age of Titus, not in spirit only, but in

reality; or else had called up before him from the depths of the past a

desolated city with its vanished inhabitants, for a man clothed in the

antique fashion had just passed out of a neighboring house.

This man wore his hair short, and his face was closely shaven; he was

dressed in a brown tunic and a grayish mantle, the ends of which were

well tucked up so as not to impede his movements. He walked at a rapid

gait, bordering upon a run, and passed by Octavian without perceiving

him. He carried on his arm a basket made of Spanish broom, and

proceeded toward the Forum Nundinarium. He was evidently a slave, some

Davus, going to market beyond a doubt.

The noise of wheels became audible, and an antique wagon, drawn by white

oxen and loaded with vegetables, came along the street. Beside the team

walked a peasant--with legs bare and sunburnt, and feet

sandal-shod--who was clad in a sort of canvas shirt puffed out about the

waist; a conical straw hat hanging at his shoulders, and depending from

his neck by the chin-band, left his face exposed to view--a type of face

unknown in these days--a forehead low and traversed by salient, knotty

lines, hair black and curly, eyes tranquil as those of his oxen, and a

neck like that of the rustic Hercules. As he gravely pricked his animals

with the goad, his statuesque attitudes would have thrown Ingres into

ecstasy.

The peasant perceived Octavian and appeared surprised, but he proceeded

on his way without being able, doubtless, to find any explanation for

the appearance of this strange-looking personage, and in his rustic

simplicity willingly leaving the solution of the enigma to those wiser

than himself.

Campanian peasants also appeared on the scene, driving before them asses

laden with skins of wine, and ringing their brazen bells. Their

physiognomies differed from those of the modern peasants as a medallion

differs from a son.

Gradually the city became peopled, like one of those panoramic pictures

at first desolate, but which by a sudden change of light become animated

with personages previously invisible.

Octavian's feelings had undergone a change. Only a short time before,

amid the deceitful shadows of the night, he had fallen a prey to that

uneasiness from which the bravest are not exempt amid such disquieting

and fantastic surroundings as reason cannot explain. His vague terror

had ultimately yielded to a profound stupefaction. The distinctness of

his perceptions forbade him to doubt the testimony of his senses, yet

what he beheld seemed altogether contrary to reason. Feeling still but

half convinced, he sought by the authentication of minor actual details

to assure himself that he was not the victim of hallucination. Those

figures which passed before his eyes could not be phantoms, for the

living sun shone upon them with unmistakable reality, and their shadows,

elongated in the morning light, fell upon the pavement and the walls.

Without the faintest understanding of what had befallen him, Octavian,

ravished with delight to find one of his most cherished dreams realized,

no longer attempted to resist the fate of his adventure. He abandoned

himself to the mystery of these marvels without any further attempt to

explain them; he averred to himself that since he had been permitted, by

virtue of some mysterious power, to live for a few hours in a vanished

age, he would not waste time in efforts to solve an incomprehensible

problem, and he proceeded fearlessly gazing to right and left upon this

scene at once so old and yet so new to him. But to what epoch of

Pompeiian life had he been transported? An ædile inscription engraved

upon a wall showed him by the names of public personages there recorded,

that it was about the commencement of the reign of Titus, or in the

year 79 of our own era. A sudden thought flashed across Octavian's mind.

The woman whose mould he had seen in the museum at Naples must be

living, inasmuch as the eruption of Vesuvius by which she had perished

took place on the 24th of August in this very year: he might therefore

discover her, behold her, speak to her!... The mad longing which had

seized him at the sight of that mass of cinders moulded upon a divinely

perfect form, was perhaps about to be fully satisfied, for surely naught

could be impossible to a love which had had the strength to make Time

itself recoil, and the same hour to pass twice through the sand-glass of

Eternity!

While Octavian was abandoning himself to these reflections, beautiful

young girls were passing by on their way to the fountains, all balancing

urns upon their heads with their white finger-tips, and patricians clad

in white togas bordered with purple bands were proceeding toward the

Forum, each followed by an escort of clients. The buyers commenced to

throng about the booths, which were all designated by sculptured or

pictured signs, and recalled by reason of their shape and small

dimensions the moresque booths of Algiers. Over most of them a glorious

phallus of baked and painted clay, together with the inscription, _Hic

habitat Felicitas_, testified to superstitious precautions against the

evil eye. Octavian also noticed an amulet shop, whose shelves were

stocked with horns, bifurcated branches of coral, and little figures of

Priapus in gold, like those worn in Naples even at this day as a

safeguard against the _jettatura_, and he thought to himself that a

superstition often outlives a religion.

* * * * *

Following the sidewalk which borders each street in Pompeii (and

deprives the English of all claim to this invention), Octavian suddenly

found himself face to face with a beautiful young man of about his own

age, clad in a saffron-colored tunic, and a mantle of snowy linen as

supple as cashmere. The sight of Octavian in his frightful modern hat,

girthed about with a scanty black frock-coat, his legs confined in

pantaloons, and his feet cramped in well-polished boots, seemed to

surprise the young Pompeiian in much the same way as one of us would

feel astonished to meet on the Boulevard de Gand some Iowa Indian or

native of Butocudo, bedecked with his feathers, necklace of

bear's-claws, or whimsical tattooing. Nevertheless, being a well-bred

young man, he did not burst out laughing in Octavian's face, and pitying

the poor barbarian who had lost his way, no doubt, in that Græco-Roman

city, he said to him in a soft, clear voice: "_Advena, salve!_"

Nothing could be more natural than that an inhabitant of Pompeii, in the

reign of the divine, most powerful, and most august Emperor Titus,

should speak Latin, yet Octavian started at hearing this dead tongue in

a living mouth. It was then, indeed, that he congratulated himself on

having been proficient in his college studies, and taken the honors at

the annual examinations. The Latin taught him by the University served

him in good stead on that unique occasion, and calling back to mind some

souvenirs of his college course, he returned the salutation of the

Pompeiian after the style of _De viris illustribus_ and _Selectæ e

profanis_, in a tolerably intelligible manner, but with a Parisian

accent which forced the young man to smile despite himself.

"Perhaps it will be easier for you to converse in Greek," said the

Pompeiian. "I am also acquainted with that language, for I studied at

Athens."

"I am even less familiar with Greek than with Latin," replied Octavian.

"I am from the land of Gaul--from Paris--from Lutetia."

"I know that country. My grandfather served under the great Julius

Cæsar in the Gallic wars. But what a strange dress you wear! The Gauls

whom I saw at Rome were not thus attired."

Octavian attempted to explain to the young Pompeiian that twenty

centuries had rolled by since the conquest of Gaul by Julius Cæsar, and

that the fashions had changed; but he forgot his Latin, and indeed, to

tell the truth, he had but little to forget.

"My name is Rufus Holconius, and my house is at your service," said the

young man, "unless, indeed, you prefer the freedom of the tavern. It is

hard by the public-house of Albinus, near the gate of the suburb of

Augustus Felix and the Inn of Sarinus, son of Publius, just at the

second turn; but if you wish, I will be your guide through this city, in

which you do not seem to be acquainted. Young barbarian, I like you,

although you endeavored to impose upon my credulity by pretending that

the Emperor Titus, who now reigns, died two thousand years ago, and that

the Nazarean (whose infamous followers were plastered with pitch and

burned to illuminate Nero's gardens) rules sole master of the deserted

heavens whence the great gods have fallen! By Pollux!" he continued as

his eyes fell upon a rubric inscription at a street-corner, "you have

just come in good time. The _Casina_ of Plautus, which has quite

recently been put upon the stage, will be played to-day. It is a curious

and laughable comedy which will amuse you, even if you only comprehend

the pantomime of it. Come with me. It is nearly time for the play

already. I will find you a place in the seat set apart for guests and

strangers." And Rufus Holconius led the way toward the little comic

theatre which the three friends had visited during the day.

The Frenchman and the citizen of Pompeii proceeded along the Street of

the Fountains of Abundance and the Street of the Theatres, passing by

the College, the Temple of Isis, and the Studio of the Sculptor, and

entered the Odeon or Comic Theatre by a lateral vomitory. Through the

recommendations of Holconius, Octavian obtained a seat near the

proscenium in a part of the theatre corresponding to our private boxes

which front upon the stage. All eyes were immediately turned upon him

with good-natured curiosity, and a low whispering arose all through the

amphitheatre.

The play had not yet commenced, and Octavian profited by the interval to

examine the building. The semicircular seats, terminated at either end

by a magnificent lion's paw sculptured in Vesuvian lava, receded,

broadening as they rose, from an empty space corresponding to our

_parterre_, but much narrower and paved in mosaic with Greek marble.

The rows of seats widened above one another in regular gradation

according to distance, and four stairways, corresponding with the

vomitories, and sloping from the base to the summit of the amphitheatre,

divided it into five _cunei_ or wedge-shaped compartments, with the

broad end uppermost. The spectators, all furnished with tickets

consisting of little slips of ivory, upon which were indicated in

numerical order the row, division, and seat, together with the name of

the play and its author, took their places without confusion. The

magistrates, nobility, married men, young folks, and the soldiers--who

attracted attention by the gleaming of their bronze helmets--all

occupied different rows of seats.

It was an admirable spectacle. Those beautiful togas and great white

mantles displayed in the first row of seats, contrasting with the

vari-colored garments of the women seated in the circle above, and the

gray capes of the populace who were assigned to the upper benches near

the columns which supported the roof, and between which were visible

glimpses of a sky intensely blue as the azure background of the

Panathenæa.

A fine spray aromatized with saffron fell from the friezes above in

imperceptible mist, at once cooling and purifying the air. Octavian

thought of the fetid emanations which vitiate the atmosphere of our

modern theatres--theatres so uncomfortable that they may justly be

considered places of torture rather than places of amusement, and he

found that modern civilization had not, after all, made much progress.

The curtain, sustained by a transverse beam, sank into the depths of the

orchestra; the musicians took their seats, and the Prologue appeared in

grotesque attire, his face concealed by a frightful mask which fitted

the head like a helmet.

Having saluted the audience and demanded applause, the Prologue

commenced a merry argumentation. Old plays, he said, were like old wine

which improves with age; and _Casina_, so dear to the old, should not be

less so to the young: all could take pleasure in it, some because they

were familiar with it, others because they were not. Moreover, the play

had been carefully remounted, and should be heard with a cheerful mind,

without thinking about one's debts or one's creditors, for people were

not liable to be arrested at the theatre. It was a happy day, the

weather was fair, and the halcyons hovered over the Forum.

Then he gave an analysis of the comedy about to be performed by the

actors, with that minuteness of detail which shows how little the

element of surprise entered into the theatrical pleasures of the

ancient. He told how the aged Stalino, being enamored of his beautiful

slave Casina, desired to marry her to his farmer Olympio, a complaisant

spouse whose place he himself would fill on the nuptial night; and how

Lycostrata, wife of Stalino, in order to thwart the luxury of her

vicious husband, sought to unite Casina in marriage to the groom

Chalinus with the further idea of favoring the amours of her son--in

fine, how the deceived Stalino mistook a young slave in disguise for

Casina, who, being discovered to be free, and of free birth, espouses

the young master whom she loves and by whom she is beloved.

As in a reverie, the young Frenchman watched the actors with their

bronze-mouthed masks, exerting themselves upon the stage; the slaves ran

hither and thither, feigning great haste; the old man wagged his head

and extended his trembling hand; the matron with high words and scornful

mien strutted in her importance and quarrelled with her husband, to the

great delight of the audience. All these personages made their entrances

and exits through three doors contrived in the foundation-wall and

communicating with the green-room of the actors. The house of Stalino

occupied one corner of the stage, and that of his old friend Alcesimus

faced it on the opposite side. These decorations, although very well

painted, represented the idea of a place rather than the place itself,

like most of the vague scenery of the classic theatres.

When the nuptial procession, pompously escorting the false Casina,

entered upon the stage, a mighty burst of laughter, such as Homer

attributes to the gods, rang through all the amphitheatre, and thunders

of applause evoked the vibrating echoes of the enclosure, but Octavian

heard no more and saw no more of the play.

In the circle of seats occupied by the women, he had just beheld a

creature of marvellous beauty. From that moment all the other charming

faces which had attracted his attention became eclipsed as the stars

before the face of Phœbus--all vanished, all disappeared as in a dream;

a mist clouded the circles of seats with their swarming multitudes, and

the high-pitched voices of the actors seemed lost in infinite distance.

His heart received a sudden shock as of electricity, and it seemed to

him that sparks flew from his breast when the eyes of that woman turned

upon him.

She was dark and pale. Her locks, crisp-flowing and black as the tresses

of Night, streamed backward over her temples after the fashion of the

Greeks, and in her pallid face beamed soft, melancholy eyes, heavy with

an indefinable expression of voluptuous sadness and passionate _ennui_.

Her mouth, with its disdainful curves, protested by the living warmth of

its burning crimson against the tranquil pallor of her cheeks, and the

curves of her neck presented those pure and beautiful outlines now to be

found only in statues. Her arms were naked to the shoulder, and from the

peaks of her splendid bosom, which betrayed its superb curves beneath a

mauve-rose tunic, fell two graceful folds of drapery that seemed to have

been sculptured in marble by Phidias or Cleomenes.

The sight of that bosom, so faultless in contour, so pure in its

outlines, magnetically affected Octavian. It seemed to him that those

rich curves corresponded perfectly to that hollow mould in the museum at

Naples which had thrown him into so ardent a reverie, and from the

depths of his heart a voice cried out to him that this woman was indeed

the same who had been suffocated in the villa of Arrius Diomedes by the

cinders of Vesuvius. What prodigy, then, enabled him to behold her

living, and witnessing the performance of the _Casina_ of Plautus? But

he forbore to seek an explanation of the problem. For that matter, how

did he himself happen to be there? He accepted the fact of his presence

as in dreams we never question the intervention of persons actually

long dead, but who seem to act nevertheless like living people; besides,

his emotion forbade him to reason. For him the Wheel of Time had left

its track, and his all-conquering love had chosen its place among the

ages passed away. He found himself face to face with his chimera, one of

the most unattainable of all, a retrospective chimera. The cup of his

whole life had in a single instant been filled to overflowing.

While gazing upon that face, at once so calm and passionate, so cold and

yet so replete with warmth, so dead, yet so radiant with life, he felt

that he beheld before him his first and last love, his cup of supreme

intoxication; he felt all the memories of all the women whom he ever

believed that he had loved, vanish like impalpable shadows, and his

heart became once more virginally pure of all anterior passion. The past

was dead within him.

Meanwhile the fair Pompeiian, resting her chin upon the palm of her

hand, turned upon Octavian, though feigning the while to be absorbed in

the performance, the velvet gaze of her nocturnal eyes, and that look

fell upon him heavy and burning as a jet of molten lead. Then she turned

to whisper some words in the ear of a maid seated at her side.

The performance closed. The crowd poured out of the theatre through the

vomitories, and Octavian, disdaining the kindly offices of his friend

Holconius, rushed to the nearest door-way. He had scarcely reached the

entrance when a hand was lightly laid upon his arm, and a feminine voice

exclaimed in tones at once low yet so distinct that not a syllable

escaped him:

"I am Tyche Novaleia, entrusted with the pleasures of Arria Marcella,

daughter of Arrius Diomedes. My mistress loves you. Follow me."

Arria Marcella had just entered her litter, borne by four strong Syrian

slaves, naked to the waist, whose bronze torsos shone under the

sunlight. The curtain of the litter was drawn aside, and a pale hand,

starred with brilliant rings, waved a friendly signal to Octavian, as

though in confirmation of the attendant's words. Then the purple folds

of the curtain fell again, and the litter was borne away to the

rhythmical sound of the footsteps of the slaves.

Tyche conducted Octavian along winding byways, tripping lightly across

the streets over the stepping-stones which connected the foot-paths, and

between which the wheels of the chariots rolled, wending her way through

the labyrinth with that certainty which bears witness to thorough

familiarity with a city. Octavian noticed that he was traversing

portions of Pompeii which had never been excavated, and which were in

consequence totally unknown to him. Among so many other equally strange

circumstances, this caused him no astonishment. He had made up his mind

to be astonished at nothing. Amid all this archaic phantasmagory, which

would have driven an antiquarian mad with joy, he no longer saw anything

save the dark, deep eyes of Arria Marcella, and that superb bosom which

had vanquished even Time, and which Destruction itself had sought to

preserve.

They arrived at last before a private gate which opened to admit them,

and closed again as soon as they had entered, and Octavian found

himself in a court surrounded by Ionic columns of Greek marble, painted

bright yellow for half their height and crowned with capitals relieved

with blue and red ornaments. A wreath of aristolochia suspended its

great green heart-shaped leaves from the projections of the architecture

like a natural arabesque, and near a marble basin framed in plants one

flaming rose towered on a single stalk--a plume-flower in the midst of

natural flowers. The walls were adorned with panelled fresco-work,

representing fanciful architecture or imaginary landscape views.

Octavian obtained only a hurried glance at all these details, for Tyche

immediately placed him in the hands of the slaves who had charge of the

bath, and who subjected him, notwithstanding his impatience, to all the

refinements of the antique _thermæ._ After having submitted to the

several necessary degrees of vapor-heat, endured the scraper of the

_strigillarius_, and felt cosmetics and perfumed oils poured over him in

streams, he was reclothed with a white tunic, and again met Tyche at the

opposite door, who took him by the hand and conducted him into another

apartment gorgeously decorated.

Upon the ceiling were painted, with a purity of design, brilliancy of

color, and freedom of touch which bespoke the hand of a great master

rather than of the mere ordinary decorator, Mars, Venus, and Love. A

frieze composed of deer, hares, and birds, disporting themselves amid

rich foliage, ran around the apartment above a wainscoting of cipollino

marble; the mosaic pavement, a marvellous work from the hand, perhaps,

of Sosimus of Pergamos, represented banquet-scenes in relief, with a

perfection of art which deluded the eye.

At the further end of the hall, upon a biclinium, or double couch,

reclined Arria Marcella in an attitude which recalled the reclining

woman of Phidias, upon the pediment of the Parthenon. Her

pearl-embroidered shoes lay at the foot of the couch, and her beautiful

bare foot, purer and whiter than marble, extended from beneath the light

covering of byssus which had been thrown over her.

Two earrings, fashioned in the form of balance-scales, and bearing

pearls in either scale, trembled in the light against her pale cheeks. A

necklace of golden balls, with pear-shaped pendants attached, hung down

upon her bosom, which the negligent folds of a straw-colored peplum,

with a Greek border in black lines, had left half uncovered; a gold and

black fillet passed and glittered here and there through her ebon

tresses, for she had changed her dress upon returning from the theatre,

and around her arm, like the asp about the arm of Cleopatra, a golden

serpent with jewelled eyes entwined itself in many folds and sought to

bite its own tail.

Close by the double couch had been placed a little table, supported upon

griffins' paws, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and freighted with

different viands served upon dishes of silver and gold, or of

earthenware enamelled with costly paintings. A Phasian bird, cooked in

its plumage, was visible, and also various fruits which are seldom seen

together in any one season.

Everything seemed to indicate that a guest was expected. The floor had

been strewn with fresh flowers, and the amphoræ of wine were plunged

into urns filled with snow.

* * * * *

Arria Marcella made a sign to Octavian to lie down upon the biclinium

beside her and share her repast. Half-maddened with astonishment and

love, the young man took at random a few mouthfuls from the plates

extended to him by little curly-haired Asiatic slaves, who wore short

tunics. Arria did not eat, but she frequently raised to her lips an

opal-tinted myrrhine vase filled with a wine darkly purple like

thickened blood. As she drank an imperceptible rosy vapor mounted to her

cheeks from her heart, the heart that had never throbbed for so many

centuries; nevertheless, her bare arm, which Octavian lightly touched in

the act of raising his cup, was cold as the skin of a serpent or the

marble of a tomb.

"Ah, when you paused in the Studii Museum to contemplate the mass of

hardened clay which still preserves my form," exclaimed Arria Marcella,

turning her long, liquid eyes upon Octavian, "and your thoughts were

ardently directed to me, my spirit felt it in that world where I float,

invisible to vulgar eyes. Faith makes God, and love makes woman. One is

truly dead only when one is no longer loved. Your desire has restored

life to me. The mighty invocation of your heart overcame the dim

distances that separated us."

The idea of amorous invocation which the young woman spoke of entered

into the philosophic beliefs of Octavian, beliefs which we ourselves are

not far from sharing.

In effect, nothing dies; all things are eternal. No power can annihilate

that which once had being. Every action, every word, every thought which

has fallen into the universal ocean of being, therein creates circles

which travel, and increase in travelling, even to the confines of

eternity. To vulgar eyes only do natural forms disappear, and the

spectres which have thence detached themselves people Infinity. Paris,

in some unknown region of space, continues to carry off Helen. The

galley of Cleopatra still floats down with swelling sails of silk upon

the azure current of an ideal Cydnus. A few passionate and powerful

minds have been able to recall before them ages apparently long passed

away, and to restore to life personages dead to all the world beside.

Faust has had for his mistress the daughter of Tyndarus, and conducted

her to his Gothic castle in the depths of the mysterious abysses of

Hades. Octavian had been able to live a day under the reign of Titus,

and to make himself beloved of Arria Marcella, daughter of Arrius

Diomedes, she who was at that moment lying upon an antique couch beside

him in a city destroyed for all the rest of the world.

"From my disgust with other women," replied Octavian, "from the

unconquerable reverie which attracted me toward its radiant shapes as to

stars that lure on, I knew that I could never love save beyond the

confines of Time and Space. It was you that I awaited; and that frail

vestige of your being, preserved by the curiosity of men, has by its

secret magnetism placed me in communication with your spirit. I know not

if you be a dream or a reality, a phantom or a woman; if, like Ixion, I

press but a cloud to my cheated breast; if I am only the victim of some

vile spell of sorcery--but what I do truly know is that you will be my

first and my last love."

"May Eros, son of Aphrodite, hear your promise," returned Arria

Marcella, dropping her head upon the shoulder of her lover, who lifted

her in a passionate embrace. "Oh, press me to your young breast! Envelop

me with your warm breath. I am cold through having remained so long

without love." And against his heart Octavian felt that beautiful bosom

rise and fall, whose mould he had that very morning admired through the

glass of a cabinet in the museum. The coolness of that beautiful flesh

penetrated him through his tunic and made him burn. The gold and black

fillet had become detached from Arria's head, passionately thrown back,

and her hair streamed like a black river over the purple pillow.

The slaves had removed the table. A confused sound of sighs and kisses

was alone audible. The pet quails, indifferent to this amorous scene,

plundered the crumbs of the banquet upon the mosaic pavement, uttering

sharp little cries.

Suddenly the brazen rings of the curtain which closed the entrance to

the apartment slided back upon the curtain-rod, and an aged man of stern

demeanor and wrapped in a great brown mantle appeared upon the

threshold. His gray beard was divided into two points after the manner

of the Nazareans. His face seemed furrowed by the suffering of ascetic

mortifications, and a little cross of black wood was suspended from his

neck, leaving no doubt as to his faith. He belonged to the sect, then

new, of the Disciples of Christ.

On perceiving him, Arria Marcella, overwhelmed with confusion, hid her

face in the folds of her mantle, like a bird which puts its head under

its wing at the approach of an enemy from whom it cannot escape, to save

itself at least from the horror of seeing him, while Octavian, rising on

his elbow, stared fixedly at the provoking being who had thus abruptly

interrupted his happiness.

"Arria, Arria!" exclaimed the austere personage in a voice of reproach,

"did not your lifetime suffice for your misconduct, and must your

infamous amours encroach upon centuries to which they do not belong? Can

you not leave the living in their sphere? Have not your ashes cooled

since the day when you perished unrepentant beneath the rain of volcanic

fire? So, then, even two thousand years have not sufficed to calm your

passion, and your voracious arms still draw to your heartless breast of

marble the poor mad-men whom your philters have intoxicated!"

"Arrius, father, mercy! Do not crush me in the name of that morose

religion which was never mine! I believed in our ancient gods, who loved

life and youth and beauty and pleasure. Do not hurl me back into pale

nothingness! Let me enjoy this life that love has given back to me!"

"Silence, impious woman! Speak not to me of your gods, which are demons.

Let this man, whom you have fettered with your impure seductions, depart

hence. Draw him no more beyond the circle of that life which God

measured out for him. Return to the Limbo of paganism with your Asiatic,

Roman, or Greek lovers. Young Christian, forsake that larva, who would

seem to you more hideous than Empousa or Phorkyas, could you but see her

as she is!"

Pale and frozen with horror, Octavian tried to speak, but his voice

clung to his throat, according to the expression of Virgil.

"Will you obey me, Arria?" imperiously cried the tall old man.

"No, never!" responded Arria, with flashing eyes, dilated nostrils, and

passion-trembling lips, as she suddenly encircled the body of Octavian

with her beautiful statuesque arms, cold, hard, and rigid as marble. Her

furious beauty, enhanced by the struggle, shone forth at that supreme

moment with supernatural brightness, as though to leave its imperishable

souvenir with her young lover.

"Then, unhappy woman," exclaimed the old man, "I must needs employ

extreme measures, and render your nothingness palpable and visible to

this fascinated child." And in a voice of command he pronounced a

formula of exorcism that banished from Arria's cheeks the purple tints

with which the black wine from the myrrhine vase had suffused them.

At the same moment the distant bell of one of those hamlets which border

the sea-coast, or lie hidden in the mountain hollows, rang out the first

peal of the angelus.

A sob of agony burst from the broken heart of the young woman at that

sound. Octavian felt her encircling arms untwine, the draperies which

covered her sank fold on fold, as though the contours which sustained

them had suddenly given way, and the wretched night-walker beheld on the

banquet-couch beside him only a handful of cinders mingled with a few

fragments of calcined bones, among which gold bracelets and jewelry

glittered, together with such other shapeless remains as were found in

excavating the villa of Arrius Diomedes.

He uttered one fearful cry and became insensible.

The old man had disappeared, the sun rose, and the hall, so brilliantly

decorated but a short time before, became only a dismantled ruin.

After a heavy slumber, inspired by the libations of the previous

evening, Max and Fabio started from their sleep, and at once called

their comrade, whose room adjoined their own, with one of those

burlesque rallying cries which are so commonly made use of by

travellers. Octavian, for the best of reasons, returned no answer. Fabio

and Max, hearing no response, entered their friend's chamber and

perceived that the bed had not been disturbed.

"He must have fallen asleep in some chair," said Fabio, "without being

able to get to bed, for our good Octavian cannot bear much liquor; and

most likely he is taking an early walk to dissipate the fumes of the

wine in the fresh morning air."

"But he did not drink much," returned Max, in a thoughtful manner. "All

this seems very strange to me. Let us go and find him!"

Accompanied by the cicerone, the two friends searched all the streets,

squares, cross-roads, and alleys of Pompeii, entering every curious

building where they thought Octavian might be occupied in copying a

painting or taking down an inscription, and finally discovered him lying

insensible upon the disjointed mosaic pavement of a small ruined

chamber. They had much difficulty in restoring him to consciousness, and

on reviving, his only explanation of the circumstance was that he had

taken a fancy to see Pompeii by moonlight, and had been seized with a

sudden faintness, which would doubtless result in nothing serious.

The little party returned by rail to Naples, as they had come, and the

same evening, from their private box at the San Carlo, Max and Fabio

watched through their opera glasses a troupe of nymphs dancing in a

ballet, under the leadership of Amalia Ferraris, the _danseuse_ then in

vogue, all wearing under their gauzy skirts frightful green drawers,

which made them look like so many frogs stung by a tarantula. Pale, with

woful eyes, and the general air of one crushed by suffering, Octavian

seemed to doubt the reality of what transpired upon the stage, so

difficult did he find it to resume the sentiments of real life after the

marvellous adventures of the night.

From the time of that visit to Pompeii Octavian fell into a dismal

melancholy, which the good-humored pleasantry of his companions rather

aggravated than soothed. The image of Arria Marcella haunted him

incessantly, and the sad termination of his fantastic good fortune had

never destroyed its charm.

Unable to contain his misery, he returned secretly to Pompeii, and once

again wandered among the ruins by moonlight as before, his heart

palpitating with maddening hope; but the hallucination never returned.

He saw only the lizards fleeing over the stones, he heard only the

screams of the startled night-birds. He met his friend Rufus Holconius

no more, Tyche came not to lay her supple hand upon his arm, Arria

Marcella obstinately slumbered in her dust.

Abandoning all hope, Octavian finally married a charming young English

girl, who is madly in love with him. He is perfectly well behaved to his

wife, yet Ellen, with that subtle instinct of the heart which nothing

can deceive, feels that her husband is enamored of another. But of whom?

That is a mystery which the most unflagging watchfulness cannot enable

her to unravel. Octavian never entertains actresses. In society he

addresses to women only the most commonplace gallantries. He even

returned with the greatest coldness the marked advances of a certain

Russian princess celebrated for her beauty and her coquetry. A secret

drawer, opened during her husband's absence, afforded no confirmation of

infidelity to Ellen's suspicions. But how could she permit herself to be

jealous of Arria Marcella, daughter of Arrius Diomedes, the freedman of

Tiberius?

THE MUMMY'S FOOT

I had entered, in an idle mood, the shop of one of those curiosity

venders who are called _marchands de bric-à-brac_ in that Parisian

_argot_ which is so perfectly unintelligible elsewhere in France.

You have doubtless glanced occasionally through the windows of some of

these shops, which have become so numerous now that it is fashionable to

buy antiquated furniture, and that every petty stockbroker thinks he

must have his _chambre au moyen âge_.

There is one thing there which clings alike to the shop of the dealer in

old iron, the ware-room of the tapestry maker, the laboratory of the

chemist, and the studio of the painter: in all those gloomy dens where a

furtive daylight filters in through the window-shutters the most

manifestly ancient thing is dust. The cobwebs are more authentic than

the guimp laces, and the old pear-tree furniture on exhibition is

actually younger than the mahogany which arrived but yesterday from

America.

The warehouse of my bric-à-brac dealer was a veritable Capharnaum. All

ages and all nations seemed to have made their rendezvous there. An

Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet, with ebony panels,

brightly striped by lines of inlaid brass; a duchess of the court of

Louis XV. nonchalantly extended her fawn-like feet under a massive table

of the time of Louis XIII., with heavy spiral supports of oak, and

carven designs of chimeras and foliage intermingled.

Upon the denticulated shelves of several sideboards glittered immense

Japanese dishes with red and blue designs relieved by gilded hatching,

side by side with enamelled works by Bernard Palissy, representing

serpents, frogs, and lizards in relief.

From disembowelled cabinets escaped cascades of silver-lustrous Chinese

silks and waves of tinsel, which an oblique sunbeam shot through with

luminous beads, while portraits of every era, in frames more or less

tarnished, smiled through their yellow varnish.

The striped breastplate of a damascened suit of Milanese armor glittered

in one corner; loves and nymphs of porcelain, Chinese grotesques, vases

of _céladon_ and crackle-ware, Saxon and old Sèvres cups encumbered the

shelves and nooks of the apartment.

The dealer followed me closely through the tortuous way contrived

between the piles of furniture, warding off with his hand the hazardous

sweep of my coat-skirts, watching my elbows with the uneasy attention of

an antiquarian and a usurer.

It was a singular face, that of the merchant; an immense skull, polished

like a knee, and surrounded by a thin aureole of white hair, which

brought out the clear salmon tint of his complexion all the more

strikingly, lent him a false aspect of patriarchal _bonhomie_,

counteracted, however, by the scintillation of two little yellow eyes

which trembled in their orbits like two louis-d'or upon quicksilver. The

curve of his nose presented an aquiline silhouette, which suggested the

Oriental or Jewish type. His hands--thin, slender, full of nerves which

projected like strings upon the finger-board of a violin, and armed with

claws like those on the terminations of bats' wings--shook with senile

trembling; but those convulsively agitated hands became firmer than

steel pincers or lobsters' claws when they lifted any precious

article--an onyx cup, a Venetian glass, or a dish of Bohemian crystal.

This strange old man had an aspect so thoroughly rabbinical and

cabalistic that he would have been burnt on the mere testimony of his

face three centuries ago.

"Will you not buy something from me to-day, sir? Here is a Malay kreese

with a blade undulating like flame. Look at those grooves contrived for

the blood to run along, those teeth set backward so as to tear out the

entrails in withdrawing the weapon. It is a fine character of ferocious

arm, and will look well in your collection. This two-handed sword is

very beautiful. It is the work of Josepe de la Hera; and this

_colichemarde,_ with its fenestrated guard--what a superb specimen of

handicraft!"

"No; I have quite enough weapons and instruments of carnage. I want a

small figure, something which will suit me as a paper-weight, for I

cannot endure those trumpery bronzes which the stationers sell, and

which may be found on everybody's desk."

The old gnome foraged among his ancient wares, and finally arranged

before me some antique bronzes, so-called at least; fragments of

malachite, little Hindoo or Chinese idols, a kind of poussah-toys in

jade-stone, representing the incarnations of Brahma or Vishnoo, and

wonderfully appropriate to the very undivine office of holding papers

and letters in place.

I was hesitating between a porcelain dragon, all constellated with

warts, its mouth formidable with bristling tusks and ranges of teeth,

and an abominable little Mexican fetich, representing the god

Vitziliputzili _au naturel_, when I caught sight of a charming foot,

which I at first took for a fragment of some antique Venus.

It had those beautiful ruddy and tawny tints that lend to Florentine

bronze that warm living look so much preferable to the gray-green

aspect of common bronzes, which might easily be mistaken for statues in

a state of putrefaction. Satiny gleams played over its rounded forms,

doubtless polished by the amorous kisses of twenty centuries, for it

seemed a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best era of art, perhaps

moulded by Lysippus himself.

"That foot will be my choice," I said to the merchant, who regarded me

with an ironical and saturnine air, and held out the object desired that

I might examine it more fully.

I was surprised at its lightness. It was not a foot of metal, but in

sooth a foot of flesh, an embalmed foot, a mummy's foot. On examining it

still more closely the very grain of the skin, and the almost

imperceptible lines impressed upon it by the texture of the bandages,

became perceptible. The toes were slender and delicate, and terminated

by perfectly formed nails, pure and transparent as agates. The great

toe, slightly separated from the rest, afforded a happy contrast, in the

antique style, to the position of the other toes, and lent it an ærial

lightness--the grace of a bird's foot. The sole, scarcely streaked by a

few almost imperceptible cross lines, afforded evidence that it had

never touched the bare ground, and had only come in contact with the

finest matting of Nile rushes and the softest carpets of panther skin.

"Ha, ha, you want the foot of the Princess Hermonthis!" exclaimed the

merchant, with a strange giggle, fixing his owlish eyes upon me. "Ha,

ha, ha! For a paper-weight! An original idea!--artistic idea! Old

Pharaoh would certainly have been surprised had some one told him that

the foot of his adored daughter would be used for a paper-weight after

he had had a mountain of granite hollowed out as a receptacle for the

triple coffin, painted and gilded, covered with hieroglyphics and

beautiful paintings of the Judgment of Souls," continued the queer

little merchant, half audibly, as though talking to himself.

"How much will you charge me for this mummy fragment?"

"Ah, the highest price I can get, for it is a superb piece. If I had

the match of it you could not have it for less than five hundred francs.

The daughter of a Pharaoh! Nothing is more rare."

"Assuredly that is not a common article, but still, how much do you

want? In the first place let me warn you that all my wealth consists of

just five louis. I can buy anything that costs five louis, but nothing

dearer. You might search my vest pockets and most secret drawers without

even finding one poor five-franc piece more."

"Five louis for the foot of the Princess Hermonthis! That is very

little, very little, indeed. 'Tis an authentic foot," muttered the

merchant, shaking his head, and imparting a peculiar rotary motion to

his eyes. "Well, take it, and I will give you the bandages into the

bargain," he added, wrapping the foot in an ancient damask rag. "Very

fine! Real damask--Indian damask which has never been redyed. It is

strong, and yet it is soft," he mumbled, stroking the frayed tissue with

his fingers, through the trade-acquired habit which moved him to praise

even an object of such little value that he himself deemed it only

worth the giving away.

He poured the gold coins into a sort of mediæval alms-purse hanging at

his belt, repeating:

"The foot of the Princess Hermonthis to be used for a paper-weight!"

Then turning his phosphorescent eyes upon me, he exclaimed in a voice

strident as the crying of a cat which has swallowed a fish-bone:

"Old Pharaoh will not be well pleased. He loved his daughter, the dear

man!"

"You speak as if you were a contemporary of his. You are old enough,

goodness knows! but you do not date back to the Pyramids of Egypt," I

answered, laughingly, from the threshold.

I went home, delighted with my acquisition.

With the idea of putting it to profitable use as soon as possible, I

placed the foot of the divine Princess Hermonthis upon a heap of papers

scribbled over with verses, in themselves an undecipherable mosaic work

of erasures; articles freshly begun; letters forgotten, and posted in

the table drawer instead of the letter-box, an error to which

absent-minded people are peculiarly liable. The effect was charming,

_bizarre_, and romantic.

Well satisfied with this embellishment, I went out with the gravity and

pride becoming one who feels that he has the ineffable advantage over

all the passers-by whom he elbows, of possessing a piece of the Princess

Hermonthis, daughter of Pharaoh.

I looked upon all who did not possess, like myself, a paper-weight so

authentically Egyptian as very ridiculous people, and it seemed to me

that the proper occupation of every sensible man should consist in the

mere fact of having a mummy's foot upon his desk.

Happily I met some friends, whose presence distracted me in my

infatuation with this new acquisition. I went to dinner with them, for I

could not very well have dined with myself.

When I came back that evening, with my brain slightly confused by a few

glasses of wine, a vague whiff of Oriental perfume delicately

titillated my olfactory nerves. The heat of the room had warmed the

natron, bitumen, and myrrh in which the _paraschistes,_ who cut open the

bodies of the dead, had bathed the corpse of the princess. It was a

perfume at once sweet and penetrating, a perfume that four thousand

years had not been able to dissipate.

The Dream of Egypt was Eternity. Her odors have the solidity of granite

and endure as long.

I soon drank deeply from the black cup of sleep. For a few hours all

remained opaque to me. Oblivion and nothingness inundated me with their

sombre waves.

Yet light gradually dawned upon the darkness of my mind. Dreams

commenced to touch me softly in their silent flight.

The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld my chamber as it actually

was. I might have believed myself awake but for a vague consciousness

which assured me that I slept, and that something fantastic was about to

take place.

The odor of the myrrh had augmented in intensity, and I felt a slight

headache, which I very naturally attributed to several glasses of

champagne that we had drunk to the unknown gods and our future fortunes.

I peered through my room with a feeling of expectation which I saw

nothing to justify. Every article of furniture was in its proper place.

The lamp, softly shaded by its globe of ground crystal, burned upon its

bracket; the water-color sketches shone under their Bohemian glass; the

curtains hung down languidly; everything wore an aspect of tranquil

slumber.

After a few moments, however, all this calm interior appeared to become

disturbed. The woodwork cracked stealthily, the ash-covered log suddenly

emitted a jet of blue flame, and the disks of the pateras seemed like

great metallic eyes, watching, like myself, for the things which were

about to happen.

My eyes accidentally fell upon the desk where I had placed the foot of

the Princess Hermonthis.

Instead of remaining quiet, as behooved a foot which had been embalmed

for four thousand years, it commenced to act in a nervous manner,

contracted itself, and leaped over the papers like a startled frog. One

would have imagined that it had suddenly been brought into contact with

a galvanic battery. I could distinctly hear the dry sound made by its

little heel, hard as the hoof of a gazelle.

I became rather discontented with my acquisition, inasmuch as I wished

my paper-weights to be of a sedentary disposition, and thought it very

unnatural that feet should walk about without legs, and I commenced to

experience a feeling closely akin to fear.

Suddenly I saw the folds of my bed-curtain stir, and heard a bumping

sound, like that caused by some person hopping on one foot across the

floor. I must confess I became alternately hot and cold, that I felt a

strange wind chill my back, and that my suddenly rising hair caused my

night-cap to execute a leap of several yards.

The bed-curtains opened and I beheld the strangest figure imaginable

before me.

It was a young girl of a very deep coffee-brown complexion, like the

bayadere Amani, and possessing the purest Egyptian type of perfect

beauty. Her eyes were almond-shaped and oblique, with eyebrows so black

that they seemed blue; her nose was exquisitely chiselled, almost Greek

in its delicacy of outline; and she might indeed have been taken for a

Corinthian statue of bronze but for the prominence of her cheek-bones

and the slightly African fulness of her lips, which compelled one to

recognize her as belonging beyond all doubt to the hieroglyphic race

which dwelt upon the banks of the Nile.

Her arms, slender and spindle-shaped like those of very young girls,

were encircled by a peculiar kind of metal bands and bracelets of glass

beads; her hair was all twisted into little cords, and she wore upon her

bosom a little idol-figure of green paste, bearing a whip with seven

lashes, which proved it to be an image of Isis; her brow was adorned

with a shining plate of gold, and a few traces of paint relieved the

coppery tint of her cheeks.

As for her costume, it was very odd indeed.

Fancy a _pagne_, or skirt, all formed of little strips of material

bedizened with red and black hieroglyphics, stiffened with bitumen, and

apparently belonging to a freshly unbandaged mummy.

In one of those sudden flights of thought so common in dreams I heard

the hoarse falsetto of the bric-à-brac dealer, repeating like a

monotonous refrain the phrase he had uttered in his shop with so

enigmatical an intonation:

"Old Pharaoh will not be well pleased. He loved his daughter, the dear

man!"

One strange circumstance, which was not at all calculated to restore my

equanimity, was that the apparition had but one foot; the other was

broken off at the ankle!

She approached the table where the foot was starting and fidgetting

about more than ever, and there supported herself upon the edge of the

desk. I saw her eyes fill with pearly gleaming tears.

Although she had not as yet spoken, I fully comprehended the thoughts

which agitated her. She looked at her foot--for it was indeed her

own--with an exquisitely graceful expression of coquettish sadness, but

the foot leaped and ran hither and thither, as though impelled on steel

springs.

Twice or thrice she extended her hand to seize it, but could not

succeed.

Then commenced between the Princess Hermonthis and her foot--which

appeared to be endowed with a special life of its own--a very fantastic

dialogue in a most ancient Coptic tongue, such as might have been spoken

thirty centuries ago in the syrinxes of the land of Ser. Luckily I

understood Coptic perfectly well that night.

The Princess Hermonthis cried, in a voice sweet and vibrant as the tones

of a crystal bell:

"Well, my dear little foot, you always flee from me, yet I always took

good care of you. I bathed you with perfumed water in a bowl of

alabaster; I smoothed your heel with pumice-stone mixed with palm oil;

your nails were cut with golden scissors and polished with a

hippopotamus tooth; I was careful to select _tatbebs_ for you, painted

and embroidered and turned up at the toes, which were the envy of all

the young girls in Egypt. You wore on your great toe rings bearing the

device of the sacred Scarabæus, and you supported one of the lightest

bodies that a lazy foot could sustain."

The foot replied in a pouting and chagrined tone:

"You know well that I do not belong to myself any longer. I have been

bought and paid for. The old merchant knew what he was about. He bore

you a grudge for having refused to espouse him. This is an ill turn

which he has done you. The Arab who violated your royal coffin in the

subterranean pits of the necropolis of Thebes was sent thither by him.

He desired to prevent you from being present at the reunion of the

shadowy nations in the cities below. Have you five pieces of gold for my

ransom?"

"Alas, no! My jewels, my rings, my purses of gold and silver were all

stolen from me," answered the Princess Hermonthis, with a sob.

"Princess," I then exclaimed, "I never retained anybody's foot unjustly.

Even though you have not got the five louis which it cost me, I present

it to you gladly. I should feel unutterably wretched to think that I

were the cause of so amiable a person as the Princess Hermonthis being

lame."

I delivered this discourse in a royally gallant, troubadour tone which

must have astonished the beautiful Egyptian girl.

She turned a look of deepest gratitude upon me, and her eyes shone with

bluish gleams of light.

She took her foot, which surrendered itself willingly this time, like a

woman about to put on her little shoe, and adjusted it to her leg with

much skill.

This operation over, she took a few steps about the room, as though to

assure herself that she was really no longer lame.

"Ah, how pleased my father will be! He who was so unhappy because of my

mutilation, and who from the moment of my birth set a whole nation at

work to hollow me out a tomb so deep that he might preserve me intact

until that last day, when souls must be weighed in the balance of

Amenthi! Come with me to my father. He will receive you kindly, for you

have given me back my foot."

I thought this proposition natural enough. I arrayed myself in a

dressing-gown of large-flowered pattern, which lent me a very Pharaonic

aspect, hurriedly put on a pair of Turkish slippers, and informed the

Princess Hermonthis that I was ready to follow her.

Before starting, Hermonthis took from her neck the little idol of green

paste, and laid it on the scattered sheets of paper which covered the

table.

"It is only fair," she observed, smilingly, "that I should replace your

paper-weight."

She gave me her hand, which felt soft and cold, like the skin of a

serpent, and we departed.

We passed for some time with the velocity of an arrow through a fluid

and grayish expanse, in which half-formed silhouettes flitted swiftly by

us, to right and left.

For an instant we saw only sky and sea.

A few moments later obelisks commenced to tower in the distance; pylons

and vast flights of steps guarded by sphinxes became clearly outlined

against the horizon.

We had reached our destination.

The princess conducted me to a mountain of rose-colored granite, in the

face of which appeared an opening so narrow and low that it would have

been difficult to distinguish it from the fissures in the rock, had not

its location been marked by two stelæ wrought with sculptures.

Hermonthis kindled a torch and led the way before me.

We traversed corridors hewn through the living rock. Their walls,

covered with hieroglyphics and paintings of allegorical processions,

might well have occupied thousands of arms for thousands of years in

their formation. These corridors of interminable length opened into

square chambers, in the midst of which pits had been contrived, through

which we descended by cramp-irons or spiral stairways. These pits again

conducted us into other chambers, opening into other corridors, likewise

decorated with painted sparrow-hawks, serpents coiled in circles, the

symbols of the _tau_ and _pedum_--prodigious works of art which no

living eye can ever examine--interminable legends of granite which only

the dead have time to read through all eternity.

At last we found ourselves in a hall so vast, so enormous, so

immeasurable, that the eye could not reach its limits. Files of

monstrous columns stretched far out of sight on every side, between

which twinkled livid stars of yellowish flame; points of light which

revealed further depths incalculable in the darkness beyond.

The Princess Hermonthis still held my hand, and graciously saluted the

mummies of her acquaintance.

My eyes became accustomed to the dim twilight, and objects became

discernible.

I beheld the kings of the subterranean races seated upon thrones--grand

old men, though dry, withered, wrinkled like parchment, and blackened

with naphtha and bitumen--all wearing _pshents_ of gold, and

breast-plates and gorgets glittering with precious stones, their eyes

immovably fixed like the eyes of spinxes, and their long beards whitened

by the snow of centuries. Behind them stood their peoples, in the stiff

and constrained posture enjoined by Egyptian art, all eternally

preserving the attitude prescribed by the hieratic code. Behind these

nations, the cats, ibixes, and crocodiles contemporary with

them--rendered monstrous of aspect by their swathing bands--mewed,

flapped their wings, or extended their jaws in a saurian giggle.

All the Pharaohs were there--Cheops, Chephrenes, Psammetichus,

Sesostris, Amenotaph--all the dark rulers of the pyramids and syrinxes.

On yet higher thrones sat Chronos and Xixouthros, who was contemporary

with the deluge, and Tubal Cain, who reigned before it.

The beard of King Xixouthros had grown seven times around the granite

table, upon which he leaned, lost in deep reverie, and buried in dreams.

Farther back, through a dusty cloud, I beheld dimly the seventy-two

preadamite kings, with their seventy-two peoples, forever passed away.

After permitting me to gaze upon this bewildering spectacle a few

moments, the Princess Hermonthis presented me to her father Pharaoh, who

favored me with a most gracious nod.

"I have found my foot again! I have found my foot!" cried the princess,

clapping her little hands together with every sign of frantic joy. "It

was this gentleman who restored it to me."

The races of Kemi, the races of Nahasi--all the black, bronzed, and

copper-colored nations repeated in chorus:

"The Princess Hermonthis has found her foot again!"

Even Xixouthros himself was visibly affected.

He raised his heavy eyelids, stroked his mustache with his fingers, and

turned upon me a glance weighty with centuries.

"By Oms, the dog of Hell, and Tmeï, daughter of the Sun and of Truth,

this is a brave and worthy lad!" exclaimed Pharaoh, pointing to me with

his sceptre, which was terminated with a lotus-flower.

"What recompense do you desire?"

Filled with that daring inspired by dreams in which nothing seems

impossible, I asked him for the hand of the Princess Hermonthis. The

hand seemed to me a very proper antithetic recompense for the foot.

Pharaoh opened wide his great eyes of glass in astonishment at my witty

request.

"What country do you come from, and what is your age?"

"I am a Frenchman, and I am twenty-seven years old, venerable Pharaoh."

"Twenty-seven years old, and he wishes to espouse the Princess

Hermonthis who is thirty centuries old!" cried out at once all the

Thrones and all the Circles of Nations.

Only Hermonthis herself did not seem to think my request unreasonable.

"If you were even only two thousand years old," replied the ancient

king, "I would willingly give you the princess, but the disproportion is

too great; and, besides, we must give our daughters husbands who will

last well. You do not know how to preserve yourselves any longer. Even

those who died only fifteen centuries ago are already no more than a

handful of dust. Behold, my flesh is solid as basalt, my bones are bars

of steel!

"I will be present on the last day of the world with the same body and

the same features which I had during my lifetime. My daughter

Hermonthis will last longer than a statue of bronze.

"Then the last particles of your dust will have been scattered abroad by

the winds, and even Isis herself, who was able to find the atoms of

Osiris, would scarce be able to recompose your being.

"See how vigorous I yet remain, and how mighty is my grasp," he added,

shaking my hand in the English fashion with a strength that buried my

rings in the flesh of my fingers.

He squeezed me so hard that I awoke, and found my friend Alfred shaking

me by the arm to make me get up.

"Oh, you everlasting sleeper! Must I have you carried out into the

middle of the street, and fireworks exploded in your ears? It is

afternoon. Don't you recollect your promise to take me with you to see

M. Aguado's Spanish pictures?"

"God! I forgot all, all about it," I answered, dressing myself

hurriedly. "We will go there at once. I have the permit lying there on

my desk."

I started to find it, but fancy my astonishment when I beheld, instead

of the mummy's foot I had purchased the evening before, the little green

paste idol left in its place by the Princess Hermonthis!

OMPHALE: A ROCOCO STORY

My uncle, the Chevalier de ----, resided in a small mansion which looked

out upon the dismal Rue de Tournelles on one side, and the equally

dismal Boulevard St. Antoine upon the other. Between the Boulevard and

the house itself a few ancient elm-trees, eaten alive by mosses and

insects, piteously extended their skeleton arms from the depth of a

species of sink surrounded by high black walls. Some emaciated flowers

hung their heads languidly, like young girls in consumption, waiting for

a ray of sunshine to dry their half-rotten leaves. Weeds had invaded the

walks, which were almost undistinguishable, owing to the length of time

that had elapsed since they were last raked. One or two goldfish

floated rather than swam in a basin covered with duck-weed and

half-choked by water plants.

My uncle called that his garden!

Besides all the fine things above described in my uncle's garden, there

was also a rather unpleasant pavilion, which he had entitled the

_Délices_, doubtless by antiphrasis. It was in a state of extreme

dilapidation. The walls were bulging outwardly. Great masses of detached

plaster still lay among the nettles and wild oats where they had fallen.

The lower portions of the wall surfaces were green with putrid mould.

The woodwork of the window-shutters and doors had been badly sprung, and

they closed only partially or not at all. A species of decoration,

strongly suggestive of an immense kitchen-pot with various effluvia

radiating from it, ornamented the main entrance, for in the time of

Louis XV., when it was the custom to build _Délices_, there were always

two entrances to such pleasure houses for precaution's sake. The

cornice, overburdened with ovulos, foliated arabesques, and volutes, had

been badly dismantled by the infiltration of rain-water. In short, the

_Délices_ of my uncle, the Chevalier de ----, presented a rather

lamentable aspect.

This poor ruin, dating only from yesterday, although wearing the

dilapidated look of a thousand years' decay--a ruin of plaster, not of

stone, all cracked and warped, covered with a leprosy of lichen growth,

moss-eaten and mouldy--seemed to resemble one of those precociously old

men worn out by filthy debauches. It inspired no feeling of respect, for

there is nothing in the world so ugly and so wretched as either an old

gauze robe or an old plaster wall, two things which ought not to endure,

yet which do.

It was in this pavilion that my uncle had lodged me.

The interior was not less rococo than the exterior, although remaining

in a somewhat better state of preservation. The bed was hung with yellow

lampas, spotted over with large white flowers. An ornamental shell-work

clock ticked away upon a pedestal inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl.

A wreath of ornamental roses coquettishly twined around a Venetian

glass. Above the door the Four Seasons were painted in cameo. A fair

lady with thickly powdered hair, a sky-blue corset, and an array of

ribbons of the same hue, who had a bow in her right hand, a partridge in

her left, a crescent upon her forehead, and a leverette at her feet,

strutted and smiled with ineffable graciousness from within a large oval

frame. This was one of my uncle's mistresses of old, whom he had had

painted as Diana. It will scarcely be necessary to observe that the

furniture itself was not of the most modern style. There was, in fact,

nothing to prevent one from fancying himself living at the time of the

Regency, and the mythological tapestry with which the Avails were hung

rendered the illusion complete.

The tapestry represented Hercules spinning at the feet of Omphale. The

design was tormented after the fashion of Vanloo, and in the most

Pompadour style possible to imagine. Hercules had a spindle decorated

with rose-colored favors. He elevated his little finger with a peculiar

and special grace, like a marquis in the act of taking a pinch of

snuff, while turning a white flake of flax between his thumb and index

finger. His muscular neck was burdened with bows of ribbons, rosettes,

strings of pearls, and a thousand other feminine gew-gaws, and a large

_gorge-de-pigeon_ colored petticoat, with two very large panniers, lent

quite a gallant air to the monster-conquering hero.

Omphale's white shoulders were half covered by the skin of the Nemean

lion. Her slender hand leaned upon her lover's knotty club. Her lovely

blonde hair, powdered to ash-color, fell loosely over her neck--a neck

as supple and undulating in its outlines as the neck of a dove. Her

little feet, true realizations of the typical Andalusian or Chinese

foot, and which would have been lost in Cinderella's glass slippers,

were shod with half-antique buskins of a tender lilac color, sprinkled

with pearls. In truth, she was a charming creature. Her head was thrown

back with an adorable little mock swagger, her dimpled mouth wore a

delicious little pout, her nostrils were slightly expanded, her cheeks

had a delicate glow--an _assassin_[1]

[1] Beauty-spot.

cunningly placed there relieved their beauty in a wonderful way; she

only needed a little mustache to make her a first-class mousquetaire.

There were many other personages also represented in the tapestry--the

kindly female attendant, the indispensable little Cupid--but they did

not leave a sufficiently distinct outline in my memory to enable me to

describe them.

In those days I was quite young--not that I wish to be understood as

saying that I am now very old; but I was fresh from college, and was to

remain in my uncle's care until I could choose a profession. If the good

man had been able to foresee that I should embrace that of a fantastic

story-writer, he would certainly have turned me out of doors forthwith

and irrevocably disinherited me, for he always entertained the most

aristocratic contempt for literature in general and authors in

particular. Like the fine gentleman that he was, it would have pleased

him to have had all those petty scribblers who busy themselves in

disfiguring paper, and speaking irreverentially about people of

quality, hung or beaten to death by his attendants. Lord have mercy on

my poor uncle! He really esteemed nothing in the world except the

epistle to Zetulba.

Well, then, I had only just left college. I was full of dreams and

illusions. I was as naive as a _rosière_ of Salency, perhaps more so.

Delighted at having no more pensums to make, everything seemed to me for

the best in the best of all possible worlds. I believed in an infinity

of things. I believed in M. de Florian's shepherdess with her combed and

powdered sheep. I never for a moment doubted the reality of Madame

Deshoulière's flock. I believed that there were actually nine muses, as

stated in Father Jouvency's _Appendix de Diis et Heroïbus._ My

recollections of Berquin and of Gessner had created a little world for

me in which everything was rose-colored, sky-blue, and apple-green. Oh,

holy innocence!--_sancta simplicitas_! as Mephistopheles says.

When I found myself alone in this fine room--my own room, all to

myself!--I felt superlatively overjoyed. I made a careful inventory of

everything, even the smallest article of furniture. I rummaged every

corner, and explored the chamber in the fullest sense of the word. I was

in the fourth heaven, as happy as a king, or rather as two kings. After

supper (for we used to sup at my uncle's--a charming custom, now

obsolete, together with many other equally charming customs which I

mourn for with all the heart I have left), I took my candle and retired

forthwith, so impatient did I feel to enjoy my new dwelling-place.

While I was undressing I fancied that Omphale's eyes had moved. I looked

more attentively in that direction, not without a slight sensation of

fear, for the room was very large, and the feeble luminous penumbra

which floated about the candle only served to render the darkness still

more visible. I thought I saw her turning her head toward me. I became

frightened in earnest, and blew out the light. I turned my face to the

wall, pulled the bed-clothes over my head, drew my night-cap down to my

chin, and finally went to sleep.

I did not dare to look at the accursed tapestry again for several days.

It may be well here, for the sake of imparting something of

verisimilitude to the very unlikely story I am about to relate, to

inform my fair readers that in those days I was really a very pretty

boy. I had the handsomest eyes in the world, at least they used to tell

me so; a much fairer complexion than I have now, a true carnation tint;

curly brown hair, which I still have, and seventeen years, which I have

no longer. I needed only a pretty stepmother to be a very tolerable

cherub. Unfortunately mine was fifty-seven years of age, and had only

three teeth, which was too much of one thing and too little of the

other.

One evening, however, I finally plucked up courage enough to take a peep

at the fair mistress of Hercules. She was looking at me with the saddest

and most languishing expression possible. This time I pulled my night-cap

down to my very shoulders, and buried my head in the coverlets.

I had a strange dream that night, if indeed it was a dream.

I heard the rings of my bed-curtains sliding with a sharp squeak upon

their curtain-rods, as if the curtains had been suddenly pulled back. I

awoke, at least in my dream it seemed to me that I awoke. I saw no one.

The moon shone full upon the window-panes, and projected her wan bluish

light into the room. Vast shadows, fantastic forms, were defined upon

the floor and the walls. The clock chimed a quarter, and the vibration

of the sound took a long time to die away. It seemed like a sigh. The

plainly audible strokes of the pendulum seemed like the pulsations of a

young heart, throbbing with passion.

I felt anything but comfortable, and a very bewilderment of fear took

possession of me.

A furious gust of wind banged the shutters and made the window-sashes

tremble. The woodwork cracked, the tapestry undulated. I ventured to

glance in the direction of Omphale, with a vague suspicion that she was

instrumental in all this unpleasantness, for some secret purpose of her

own. I was not mistaken.

The tapestry became violently agitated. Omphale detached herself from

the wall and leaped lightly to the carpet. She came straight toward my

bed, after having first turned herself carefully in my direction. I

fancy it will hardly be necessary to describe my stupefaction. The most

intrepid old soldier would not have felt very comfortable under similar

circumstances, and I was neither old nor a soldier. I awaited the end of

the adventure in terrified silence.

A flute-toned, pearly little voice sounded softly in my ears, with that

pretty lisp affected during the Regency by marchionesses and people of

high degree:

"Do I really frighten you, my child? It is true that you are only a

child, but it is not nice to be afraid of ladies, especially when they

are young ladies and only wish you well. It is uncivil and unworthy of a

French gentleman. You must be cured of such silly fears. Come, little

savage, leave off these foolish airs, and cease hiding your head under

the bed-clothes. Your education is by no means complete yet, my pretty

page, and you have not learned so very much. In my time cherubs were

more courageous."

"But, lady, it is because--"

"Because it seems strange to you to find me here instead of there," she

said, biting her ruddy lip with her white teeth, and pointing toward the

wall with her long taper finger. "Well, in fact, the thing does not look

very natural, but were I to explain it all to you, you would be none the

wiser. Let it be sufficient for you to know that you are not in any

danger."

"I am afraid you may be the--the--"

"The devil--out with the word!--is it not? That is what you wanted to

say. Well, at least you will grant that I am not black enough for a

devil, and that if hell were peopled with devils shaped as I am, one

might have quite as pleasant a time there as in Paradise."

And to prove that she was not flattering herself, Omphale threw back her

lion's skin and allowed me to behold her exquisitely moulded shoulders

and bosom, dazzling in their white beauty.

"Well, what do you think of me?" she exclaimed, with a pretty little air

of satisfied coquetry.

"I think that even were you the devil himself I should not feel afraid

of you any more, Madame Omphale."

"Ah, now you talk sensibly, but do not call me madame, or Omphale. I do

not wish you to look upon me as a madame, and I am no more Omphale than

I am the devil."

"Then who are you?"

"I am the Marchioness de T----. A short time after I was married the

marquis had this tapestry made for my apartments, and had me represented

on it in the character of Omphale. He himself figures there as Hercules.

That was a queer notion he took, for God knows there never was anybody

in the world who bore less resemblance to Hercules than the poor

marquis! It has been a long time since this chamber was occupied. I

naturally love company, and I almost died of _ennui_ in consequence. It

gave me the headache. To be only with one's husband is the same thing as

being alone. When you came I was overjoyed. This dead room became

reanimated. I had found some one to feel interested in. I watched you

come in and go out, I heard you murmuring in your sleep, I watched you

reading, and my eyes followed the pages. I found you were nicely

behaved, and had a fresh, innocent way about you that pleased me. In

short, I fell in love with you. I tried to make you understand. I

sighed. You thought it was only the sighing of the wind. I made signs to

you. I looked at you with languishing eyes, and only succeeded in

frightening you terribly. So at last in despair I resolved upon this

rather improper course which I have taken, to tell you frankly what you

could not take a hint about. Now that you know I love you, I hope

that--"

The conversation was interrupted at this juncture by the grating of a

key in the lock of the chamber door.

Omphale started and blushed to the very whites of her eyes.

"Adieu," she whispered, "till to-morrow." And she returned to her place

on the wall, walking backward, for fear that I should see her reverse

side, doubtless.

It was Baptiste, who came to brush my clothes.

"You ought not to sleep with your bed-curtains open, sir," he remarked.

"You might catch a bad cold. This room is so chilly."

The curtains were actually open, and as I had been under the impression

that I was only dreaming, I felt very much astonished, for I was certain

that they had been closed when I went to bed.

As soon as Baptiste left the room, I ran to the tapestry. I felt it all

over. It was indeed a real woollen tapestry, rough to the touch like any

other tapestry. Omphale resembled the charming phantom of the night only

as a dead body resembles a living one. I lifted the hangings. The wall

was solid throughout. There were no masked panels or secret doors. I

only noticed that a few threads were broken in the groundwork of the

tapestry where the feet of Omphale rested. This afforded me food for

reflection.

All that day I remained buried in the deepest brown study imaginable. I

longed for evening with a mingled feeling of anxiety and impatience. I

retired early, resolved on learning how this mystery was going to end.

I got into bed. The marchioness did not keep me waiting long. She leaped

down from the tapestry in front of the pier-glass, and dropped right by

my bed. She seated herself by my pillow, and the conversation commenced.

I asked her questions as I had done the evening before, and demanded

explanations. She eluded the former, and replied in an evasive manner to

the latter, yet always after so witty a fashion that within a quarter of

an hour I felt no scruples whatever in regard to my liaison with her.

While conversing she passed her fingers through my hair, tapped me

gently on the cheeks, and softly kissed my forehead.

She chatted and chatted in a pretty mocking way, in a style at once

elegantly polished and yet familiar and altogether like a great lady,

such as I have never since heard from the lips of any human being.

She was then seated upon the easy-chair beside the bed. In a little

while she slipped one of her arms around my neck, and I felt her heart

beating passionately against me. It was indeed a charming and handsome

real woman, a veritable marchioness whom I found beside me, poor student

of seventeen! There was more than enough to make one lose his head, so I

lost mine. I did not know very well what was going to happen, but I felt

a vague presentiment that it would displease the marquis.

"And Monsieur le Marquis, on the wall up there--what will he say?"

The lion's skin had fallen to the floor, and the soft lilac-colored

buskins, filigreed with silver, were lying beside my shoes.

"He will not say anything," replied the marchioness, laughing heartily.

"Do you suppose he ever sees anything? Besides, even should he see, he

is the most philosophical and inoffensive husband in the world. He is

used to such things. Do you love me, little one?"

"Indeed I do, ever so much!--ever so much!"

Morning dawned. My mistress stole away.

The day seemed to me frightfully long. At last evening came. The same

things happened as on the evening before, and the second night left no

regrets for the first. The marchioness became more and more adorable,

and this state of affairs continued for a long time. As I never slept at

night, I wore a somnolent expression in the day-time which did not augur

well for me with my uncle. He suspected something. He probably listened

at the door and heard everything, for one fine morning he entered my

room so brusquely that Antoinette had scarcely time to get back to her

place on the tapestry.

He was followed by a tapestry-hanger with pincers and a ladder.

He looked at me with a shrewd and severe expression which convinced me

that he knew all.

"This Marchioness de T---- is certainly crazy. What the devil could have

put it into her head to fall in love with a brat like that?" muttered my

uncle between his teeth. "She promised to behave herself.

"Jean, take that tapestry down, roll it up, and put it in the garret."

Every word my uncle spoke went through my heart like a poniard-thrust.

Jean rolled up my sweetheart Omphale, otherwise the Marchioness

Antoinette de T----, together with Hercules, or the Marquis de T----,

and carried the whole thing off to the garret. I could not restrain my

tears.

Next day my uncle sent me back in the B---- diligence to my respectable

parents, to whom, you may feel assured, I never breathed a word of my

adventure.

My uncle died; his house and furniture were sold; probably the tapestry

was sold with the rest.

But a long time afterward, while foraging the shop of a bric-à-brac

merchant in search of oddities, I stumbled over a great dusty roll of

something covered with cobwebs.

"What is that?" I said to the Auvergnat.

"That is a rococo tapestry representing the amours of Madame Omphale and

Monsieur Hercule. It is genuine Beauvais, worked in silk, and in an

excellent state of preservation. Buy this from me for your study. I will

not charge you dear for it, since it is you."

At the name of Omphale all my blood rushed to my heart.

"Unroll that tapestry," I said to the merchant in a hurried, gasping

voice, like one in a fever.

It was indeed she! I fancied that her mouth smiled graciously at me, and

that her eye lighted up on meeting mine.

"How much do you ask?"

"Well, I could not possibly let you have it for any less than five

hundred francs."

"I have not that much with me now. I will get it and be back in an

hour."

I returned with the money, but the tapestry was no longer there. An

Englishman had bargained for it during my absence, offered six hundred

francs for it, and taken it away with him.

After all, perhaps it was best that it should have been thus, and that I

should preserve this delicious souvenir intact. They say one should

never return to a first love, or look at the rose which one admired the

evening before.

And then I am no longer so young or so pretty that tapestries should

come down from their walls to honor me.

KING CANDAULES

CHAPTER I

Five hundred years before the Trojan war, and seventeen hundred and

fifteen years before our own era, there was a grand festival at Sardes.

King Candaules was going to marry. The people were affected with that

sort of pleasurable interest and aimless emotion wherewith any royal

event inspires the masses, even though it in no wise concerns them, and

transpires in superior spheres of life which they can never hope to

reach.

As soon as Phœbus-Apollo, standing in his quadriga, had gilded to

saffron the summits of fertile Mount Tmolus with his rays, the good

people of Sardes were all astir, going and coming, mounting or

descending the marble stairways leading from the city to the waters of

the Pactolus, that opulent river whose sands Midas filled with tiny

sparks of gold when he bathed in its stream. One would have supposed

that each one of these good citizens was himself about to marry, so

solemn and important was the demeanor of all.

Men were gathering in groups in the Agora, upon the steps of the temples

and along the porticoes. At every street corner one might have

encountered women leading by the hand little children, whose uneven walk

ill suited the maternal anxiety and impatience. Maidens were hastening

to the fountains, all with urns gracefully balanced upon their heads, or

sustained by their white arms as with natural handles, so as to procure

early the necessary water provision for the household, and thus obtain

leisure at the hour when the nuptial procession should pass. Washerwomen

hastily folded the still damp tunics and chlamidæ, and piled them upon

mule-wagons. Slaves turned the mill without any need of the overseer's

whip to tickle their naked and scar-seamed shoulders. Sardes was

hurrying itself to finish with those necessary every-day cares which no

festival can wholly disregard.

The road along which the procession was to pass had been strewn with

fine yellow sand. Brazen tripods, disposed along the way at regular

intervals, sent up to heaven the odorous smoke of cinnamon and

spikenard. These vapors, moreover, alone clouded the purity of the azure

above. The clouds of a hymeneal day ought, indeed, to be formed only by

the burning of perfumes. Myrtle and rose-laurel branches were strewn

upon the ground, and from the walls of the palaces were suspended by

little rings of bronze rich tapestries, whereon the needles of

industrious captives--intermingling wool, silver, and gold--had

represented various scenes in the history of the gods and heroes: Ixion

embracing the cloud; Diana surprised in the bath by Actæon; the

shepherd Paris as judge in the contest of beauty held upon Mount Ida

between Hera, the snowy-armed, Athena of the sea-green eyes, and

Aphrodite, girded with her magic cestus; the old men of Troy rising to

honor Helena as she passed through the Skaian gate, a subject taken from

one of the poems of the blind man of Meles. Others exhibited in

preference scenes taken from the life of Heracles the Theban, through

flattery to Candaules, himself a Heracleid, being descended from the

hero through Alcæus. Others contented themselves by decorating the

entrances of their dwellings with garlands and wreaths in token of

rejoicing.

Among the multitudes marshalled along the way from the royal house even

as far as the gates of the city, through which the young queen would

pass on her arrival, conversation naturally turned upon the beauty of

the bride, whereof the renown had spread throughout all Asia; and upon

the character of the bridegroom, who, although not altogether an

eccentric, seemed nevertheless one not readily appreciated from the

common standpoint of observation.

Nyssia, daughter of the Satrap Megabazus, was gifted with marvellous

purity of feature and perfection of form; at least such was the rumor

spread abroad by the female slaves who attended her, and a few female

friends who had accompanied her to the bath; for no man could boast of

knowing aught of Nyssia save the color of her veil and the elegant folds

that she involuntarily impressed upon the soft materials which robed her

statuesque body.

The barbarians did not share the ideas of the Greeks in regard to

modesty. While the youths of Achaia made no scruple of allowing their

oil-anointed torsos to shine under the sun in the stadium, and while the

Spartan virgins danced ungarmented before the altar of Diana, those of

Persepolis, Ebactana, and Bactria, attaching more importance to chastity

of the body than to chastity of mind, considered those liberties allowed

to the pleasure of the eyes by Greek manner as impure and highly

reprehensible, and held no woman virtuous who permitted men to obtain a

glimpse of more than the tip of her foot in walking, as it slightly

deranged the discreet folds of a long tunic.

Despite all this mystery, or rather, perhaps, by very reason of this

mystery, the fame of Nyssia had not been slow to spread throughout all

Lydia, and become popular there to such a degree that it had reached

even Candaules, although kings are ordinarily the most illy informed

people in their kingdoms, and live like the gods in a kind of cloud

which conceals from them the knowledge of terrestrial things.

The Eupatridæ of Sardes, who hoped that the young king might,

perchance, choose a wife from their family, the hetairæ of Athens, of

Samos, of Miletus and of Cyprus, the beautiful slaves from the banks of

the Indus, the blonde girls brought at a vast expense from the depths of

the Cimmerian fogs, were heedful never to utter in the presence of

Candaules, whether within hearing or beyond hearing, a single word which

bore any relation to Nyssia. The bravest, in a question of beauty,

recoil before the prospect of a contest in which they can anticipate

being outrivalled.

And nevertheless no person in Sardes, or even in Lydia, had beheld this

redoubtable adversary, no person save one solitary being, who from the

time of that encounter had kept his lips as firmly closed upon the

subject as though Harpocrates, the god of silence, had sealed them with

his finger, and that was Gyges, chief of the guards of Candaules. One

day Gyges, his mind filled with various projects and vague ambitions,

had been wandering among the Bactrian hills, whither his master had sent

him upon an important and secret mission. He was dreaming of the

intoxication of omnipotence, of treading upon purple with sandals of

gold, of placing the diadem upon the brows of the fairest of women.

These thoughts made his blood boil in his veins, and, as though to

pursue the flight of his dreams, he smote his sinewy heel upon the

foam-whitened flanks of his Numidian horse.

The weather, at first calm, had changed and waxed tempestuous like the

warrior's soul; and Boreas, his locks bristling with Thracian frosts,

his cheeks puffed out, his arms folded upon his breast, smote the

rain-freighted clouds with the mighty beatings of his wings.

A bevy of young girls who had been gathering flowers in the meadow,

fearing the coming storm, were returning to the city in all haste, each

carrying her perfumed harvest in the lap of her tunic. Seeing a stranger

on horseback approaching in the distance, they had hidden their faces in

their mantles, after the custom of the barbarians; but at the very

moment that Gyges was passing by the one whose proud carriage and richer

habiliments seemed to designate her the mistress of the little band, an

unusually violent gust of wind carried away the veil of the fair

unknown, and, whirling it through the air like a feather, chased it to

such a distance that it could not be recovered. It was Nyssia, daughter

of Megabazus, who found herself thus with face unveiled in the presence

of Gyges, an humble captain of King Candaules' guard. Was it only the

breath of Boreas which had brought about this accident, or had Eros, who

delights to vex the hearts of men, amused himself by severing the string

which had fastened the protecting tissue? However that may have been,

Gyges was stricken motionless at the sight of that Medusa of beauty, and

not till long after the folds of Nyssia's robe had disappeared beyond

the gates of the city could he think of proceeding on his way. Although

there was nothing to justify such a conjecture, he cherished the belief

that he had seen the satrap's daughter; and that meeting, which affected

him almost like an apparition, accorded so fully with the thoughts which

were occupying him at the moment of its occurrence, that he could not

help perceiving therein something fateful and ordained of the gods. In

truth it was upon that brow that he would have wished to place the

diadem. What other could be more worthy of it? But what probability was

there that Gyges would ever have a throne to share? He had not sought to

follow up this adventure, and assure himself whether it was indeed the

daughter of Megabazus whose mysterious face had been revealed to him by

Chance, the great filcher. Nyssia had fled so swiftly that it would have

been impossible for him then to overtake her; and, moreover, he had been

dazzled, fascinated, thunder-stricken, as it were, rather than charmed

by that superhuman apparition, by that monster of beauty! Nevertheless

that image, although seen only in the glimpse of a moment, had engraved

itself upon his heart in lines deep as those which the sculptors trace

on ivory with tools reddened in the fire. He had endeavored, although

vainly, to efface it, for the love which he felt for Nyssia inspired him

with a secret terror. Perfection in such a degree is ever awe-inspiring,

and women so like unto goddesses could only work evil to feeble mortals;

they are formed for divine adulteries, and even the most courageous men

never risk themselves in such amours without trembling. Therefore no

hope had blossomed in the soul of Gyges, overwhelmed and discouraged in

advance by the sentiment of the impossible. Ere opening his lips to

Nyssia he would have wished to despoil the heaven of its robe of stars,

to take from Phœbus his crown of rays, forgetting that women only give

themselves to those unworthy of them, and that to win their love one

must act as though he desired to earn their hate.

From that day the roses of joy no longer bloomed upon his cheeks. By day

he was sad and mournful, and seemed to wander abroad in solitary

dreaming, like a mortal who has beheld a divinity. At night he was

haunted by dreams in which he beheld Nyssia seated by his side upon

cushions of purple between the golden griffins of the royal throne.

Therefore Gyges, the only one who could speak of his own knowledge

concerning Nyssia, having never spoken of her, the Sardians were left to

their own conjectures in her regard; and their conjectures, it must be

confessed, were fantastic and altogether fabulous. The beauty of Nyssia,

thanks to the veils which shrouded her, became a sort of myth, a canvas,

a poem to which each one added ornamentation as the fancy took him.

"If report be not false," lisped a young debauchee from Athens, who

stood with one hand upon the shoulder of an Asiatic boy, "neither

Plangon, nor Archianassa, nor Thais can be compared with this marvellous

barbarian; yet I can scarce believe that she equals Theano of Colophon,

from whom I once bought a single night at the price of as much gold as

she could bear away, after having plunged both her white arms up to the

shoulder in my cedar-wood coffer."

"Beside her," added a Eupatrid, who pretended to be better informed than

any other person upon all manner of subjects, "beside her the daughter

of Cœlus and the Sea would seem but a mere Ethiopian servant."

"Your words are blasphemy, and although Aphrodite be a kind and

indulgent goddess, beware of drawing down her anger upon you."

"By Hercules!--and that ought to be an oath of some weight in a city

ruled by one of his descendants--I cannot retract a word of it."

"You have seen her, then?"

"No; but I have a slave in my service who once belonged to Nyssia, and

who has told me a hundred stories about her."

"Is it true," demanded in infantile tones an equivocal-looking woman

whose pale-rose tunic, painted cheeks, and locks shining with essences

betrayed wretched pretensions to a youth long passed away--"is it true

that Nyssia has two pupils in each eye? It seems to me that must be very

ugly, and I cannot understand how Candaules could fall in love with

such a monstrosity, while there is no lack, at Sardes and in Lydia, of

women whose eyes are irreproachable."

And uttering these words with all sorts of affected airs and simperings,

Lamia took a little significant peep in a small mirror of cast metal

which she drew from her bosom, and which enabled her to lead back to

duty certain wandering curls disarranged by the impertinence of the

wind.

"As to the double pupil, that seems to me nothing more than an old

nurse's tale," observed the well-informed patrician; "but it is a fact

that Nyssia's eyes are so piercing that she can see through walls.

Lynxes are myopic compared with her."

"How can a sensible man coolly argue about such an absurdity?"

interrupted a citizen, whose bald skull, and the flood of snowy beard

into which he plunged his fingers while speaking, lent him an air of

preponderance and philosophical sagacity. "The truth is that the

daughter of Megabazus cannot naturally see through a wall any better

than you or I, but the Egyptian priest Thoutmosis, who knows so

many-wondrous secrets, has given her the mysterious stone which is found

in the heads of dragons, and whose property, as every one knows, renders

all shadows and the most opaque bodies transparent to the eyes of those

who possess it. Nyssia always carries this stone in her girdle, or else

set into her bracelet, and in that may be found the secret of her

clairvoyance."

The citizen's explanation seemed the most natural one to those of the

group whose conversation we are endeavoring to reproduce, and the

opinions of Lamia and the patrician were abandoned as improbable.

"At all events," returned the lover of Theano, "we are going to have an

opportunity of judging for ourselves, for it seems to me that I hear the

clarions sounding in the distance, and though Nyssia is still invisible,

I can see the herald yonder approaching with palm-branches in his hands,

to announce the arrival of the nuptial _cortège_, and make the crowd

fall back."