among the leaves. The parquet floor had been laid down by the present
Marquis, and Chesnel had picked up the furniture at sales of the
wreckage of old chateaux between 1793 and 1795; so that there were
Louis Quatorze consoles, tables, clock-cases, andirons, candle-sconces
and tapestry-covered chairs, which marvelously completed a stately
room, large out of all proportion to the house. Luckily, however,
there was an equally lofty ante-chamber, the ancient Salle des Pas
Perdus of the presidial, which communicated likewise with the
magistrate's deliberating chamber, used by the d'Esgrignons as a
dining-room.

"Beneath the old paneling, amid the threadbare braveries of a bygone
day, some eight or ten dowagers were drawn up in state in a quavering
line; some with palsied heads, others dark and shriveled like mummies;
some erect and stiff, others bowed and bent, but all of them tricked
out in more or less fantastic costumes as far as possible removed from
the fashion of the day, with be-ribboned caps above their curled and
powdered 'heads,' and old discolored lace. No painter however earnest,
no caricature however wild, ever caught the haunting fascination of
those aged women; they come back to me in dreams; their puckered faces
shape themselves in my memory whenever I meet an old woman who puts me
in mind of them by some faint resemblance of dress or feature. And
whether it is that misfortune has initiated me into the secrets of
irremediable and overwhelming disaster; whether that I have come to
understand the whole range of human feelings, and, best of all, the
thoughts of Old Age and Regret; whatever the reason, nowhere and never
again have I seen among the living or in the faces of the dying the
wan look of certain gray eyes that I remember, nor the dreadful
brightness of others that were black.

"Neither Hoffmann nor Maturin, the two weirdest imaginations of our
time, ever gave me such a thrill of terror as I used to feel when I
watched the automaton movements of those bodies sheathed in whalebone.
The paint on actors' faces never caused me a shock; I could see below
it the rouge in grain, the rouge de naissance, to quote a comrade at
least as malicious as I can be. Years had leveled those women's faces,
and at the same time furrowed them with wrinkles, till they looked
like the heads on wooden nutcrackers carved in Germany. Peeping
in through the window-panes, I gazed at the battered bodies, and
ill-jointed limbs (how