atch of colour,
found suddenly displayed in the hot morning.

The artists were more delighted than ever, and frequented his company
in the little manorial habitation, deserted long since by its owners
and haunted, so that the eyes of many looked evil upon it, where he had
taken up his abode, attracted, in the first instance, by its rich
though neglected garden, a tangle of every kind of creeping, vine-like
plant. Here, surrounded in abundance by the pleasant materials of his
trade, the vine-dresser as it were turned pedant and kept school for
the various artists, who learned here an art supplementary to their
own,--that gay magic, namely (art or trick) of his existence, till they
found themselves grown into a kind of aristocracy, like veritable gens
fleur-de-lises, as they worked together for the decoration of the great
church and a hundred other [66] places beside. And yet a darkness had
grown upon him. The kind creature had lost something of his
gentleness. Strange motiveless misdeeds had happened; and, at a loss
for other causes, not the envious only would fain have traced the blame
to Denys. He was making the younger world mad. Would he make himself
Count of Auxerre? The lady Ariane, deserted by her former lover, had
looked kindly upon him; was ready to make him son-in-law to the old
count her father, old and not long for this world. The wise monk
Hermes bethought him of certain old readings in which the Wine-god,
whose part Denys had played so well, had his contrast, his dark or
antipathetic side; was like a double creature, of two natures,
difficult or impossible to harmonise. And in truth the much-prized
wine of Auxerre has itself but a fugitive charm, being apt to sicken
and turn gross long before the bottle is empty, however carefully
sealed; as it goes indeed, at its best, by hard names, among those who
grow it, such as Chainette and Migraine.

A kind of degeneration, of coarseness--the coarseness of satiety, and
shapeless, battered-out appetite--with an almost savage taste for
carnivorous diet, had come over the company. A rumour went abroad of
certain women who had drowned, in mere wantonness, their new-born
babes. A girl with child was found hanged by her own act in a dark
cellar. Ah! [67] if Denys also had not felt himself mad! But when the
guilt of a murder, committed with a great vine-axe far out among the
vineyards, was attributed vaguely to him, he could but wonder whether
it had been in