pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart...."

A moment's consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton's
Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a hideous
blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were kept up with
wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like the explosion
of fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room were strewn like
a battlefield with the insensible and incapable. Wine, pleasure,
and dispute had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love, delirium and
unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all faces, upon
the furniture; were expressed by the surrounding disorder, and brought
light films over the vision of those assembled, so that the air seemed
full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as in the luminous
paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre forms flitted through
it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart it. Groups of interlaced
figures blended with the white marbles, the noble masterpieces of
sculpture that adorned the rooms.

Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious clearness
in their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and faint thrill of
animation, it was yet almost impossible to distinguish what was real
among the fantastic absurdities before them, or what foundation there
was for the impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their
weary eyes. The strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering
heavens, the fervid sweetness caught by faces in our visions, and
unheard-of agility under a load of chains,--all these so vividly, that
they took the pranks of the orgy about them for the freaks of some
nightmare in which all movement is silent, and cries never reach
the ear. The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little
difficulty, in drawing his master into the ante-chamber to whisper to
him:

"The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket,
sir."

"If noise alarms them, why don't they lay down straw before their
doors?" was Taillefer's rejoinder.

Raphael's sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt, that
his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.

"You will hardly understand me," he replied. "In the first place, I must
admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was about to
throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no doubt, my
motives for dying. And when I proceed to