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rs, "here's the very thing for us." And without explaining his words or where he was taking me, he made me follow the crowd and enter the palace. After mounting a magnificent marble staircase and crossing a very long suite of apartments rather poorly furnished,--which is customary in Italian palaces, all their luxury being put into ceilings, statues, paintings, and other objects of art,--we reached a room that was wholly hung with black and lighted by quantities of tapers. It was, of course, a _chambre-ardente_. In the middle of it on a raised platform surmounted by a baldaquin, lay a _thing_, the most hideous and grotesque thing you can possibly conceive. Imagine a little old man whose hands and face had reached such a stage of emaciation that a mummy would have seemed to you in comparison plump and comely. Clothed in black satin breeches, a violet velvet coat cut _a la Francaise_, a white waistcoat embroidered in gold, from which issued an enormous shirt-frill of point d'Angleterre, this skeleton had cheeks covered with a thick layer of rouge which heightened still further the parchment tones of the rest of his skin. Upon his head was a blond wig frizzed into innumerable little curls, surmounted by an immense plumed hat jauntily perched to one side in a manner which irresistibly provoked the laughter of even the most respectful visitors. After one glance given to this ridiculous and lamentable exhibition,--an obligatory part of all funerals, according to the etiquette of the Roman aristocracy,--Desroziers exclaimed: "There's the end; now come and see the beginning." Not replying to any of my questions, because he was arranging a dramatic effect, he took me to the Albani gallery and placed me before a statue representing Adonis stretched on a lion's skin. "What do you think of that?" he said. "What?" I replied at a first glance; "why, it is as fine as an antique." "Antique as much as I am!" replied Desroziers. "It is a portrait in youth of that wizened old being we have just seen dead." "Antique or not, it is a masterpiece," I said. "But how is all this beauty, or its hideous caricature, to get us to Sicily? That is the question." "I'll tell you," replied Desroziers. "I know the family of that old scarecrow. His niece married the Comte de Lanty, and they have long wanted to buy this statue which the Albani museum won't give up at any price. They have tried to have it copied, but they never got anyt
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