te.

About nine o'clock, with a silken rustling, arrive the three geishas in
vogue in Nagasaki: Mesdemoiselles Purete, Orange, and Printemps, whom I
have hired at four dollars each--an enormous price in this country.

These three geishas are indeed the very same little creatures I heard
singing on the rainy day of my arrival, through the thin panelling of the
Garden of Flowers. But as I have now become thoroughly Japanized, today
they appear to me more diminutive, less outlandish, and in no way
mysterious. I treat them rather as dancers that I have hired, and the
idea that I ever had thought of marrying one of them now makes me shrug
my shoulders--as it formerly made M. Kangourou.

The excessive heat caused by the respiration of the mousmes and the
burning lamps, brings out the perfume of the lotus, which fills the
heavy-laden atmosphere; and the scent of camellia-oil, which the ladies
use in profusion to make their hair glisten, is also strong in the room.

Mademoiselle Orange, the youngest geisha, tiny and dainty, her lips
outlined with gilt paint, executes some delightful steps, donning the
most extraordinary wigs and masks of wood or cardboard. She has masks
imitating old, noble ladies which are valuable works of art, signed by
well-known artists. She has also magnificent long robes, fashioned in the
old style, with trains trimmed at the bottom with thick pads, in order to
give to the movements of the costume something rigid and unnatural which,
however, is becoming.

Now the soft balmy breezes blow through the room, from one veranda to the
other, making the flames of the lamps flicker. They scatter the lotus
flowers faded by the artificial heat, which, falling in pieces from every
vase, sprinkle the guests with their pollen and large pink petals,
looking like bits of broken, opal-colored glass.

The sensational piece, reserved for the end, is a trio on the 'chamecen',
long and monotonous, that the geishas perform as a rapid pizzicato on the
highest strings, very sharply struck. It sounds like the very
quintessence, the paraphrase, the exasperation, if I may so call it, of
the eternal buzz of insects, which issues from the trees, old roofs, old
walls, from everything in fact, and which is the foundation of all
Japanese sounds.

Half-past ten! The programme has been carried out, and the reception is
over. A last general tap! tap! tap! the little pipes are stowed away in
their chased sheaths, tied up in the sas