the bright daylight.
Their hair fell ungracefully about them; their eyes, lately so
brilliant, were heavy and dim; the expression of their faces was
entirely changed. The sickly hues, which daylight brings out so
strongly, were frightful. An olive tint had crept over the lymphatic
faces, so fair and soft when in repose; the dainty red lips were
grown pale and dry, and bore tokens of the degradation of excess. Each
disowned his mistress of the night before; the women looked wan and
discolored, like flowers trampled under foot by a passing procession.

The men who scorned them looked even more horrible. Those human faces
would have made you shudder. The hollow eyes with the dark circles round
them seemed to see nothing; they were dull with wine and stupefied with
heavy slumbers that had been exhausting rather than refreshing. There
was an indescribable ferocious and stolid bestiality about these haggard
faces, where bare physical appetite appeared shorn of all the poetical
illusion with which the intellect invests it. Even these fearless
champions, accustomed to measure themselves with excess, were struck
with horror at this awakening of vice, stripped of its disguises, at
being confronted thus with sin, the skeleton in rags, lifeless and
hollow, bereft of the sophistries of the intellect and the enchantments
of luxury. Artists and courtesans scrutinized in silence and with
haggard glances the surrounding disorder, the rooms where everything had
been laid waste, at the havoc wrought by heated passions.

Demoniac laughter broke out when Taillefer, catching the smothered
murmurs of his guests, tried to greet them with a grin. His darkly
flushed, perspiring countenance loomed upon this pandemonium, like the
image of a crime that knows no remorse (see _L'Auberge rouge_). The
picture was complete. A picture of a foul life in the midst of luxury, a
hideous mixture of the pomp and squalor of humanity; an awakening after
the frenzy of Debauch has crushed and squeezed all the fruits of life in
her strong hands, till nothing but unsightly refuse is left to her, and
lies in which she believes no longer. You might have thought of Death
gloating over a family stricken with the plague.

The sweet scents and dazzling lights, the mirth and the excitement
were all no more; disgust with its nauseous sensations and searching
philosophy was there instead. The sun shone in like truth, the pure
outer air was like virtue; in contrast with the