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 they were fastened together, and, indeed, their whole anatomy was
a mystery I never attempted to explain); I saw the lantern jaws,
the protuberant bones, the abnormal development of the hips; and the
movements of these figures as they came and went seemed to me no whit
less extraordinary than their sepulchral immobility as they sat round
the card-tables.

"The men looked gray and faded like the ancient tapestries on the wall,
in dress they were much more like the men of the day, but even they
were not altogether convincingly alive. Their white hair, their withered
waxen-hued faces, their devastated foreheads and pale eyes, revealed
their kinship to the women, and neutralized any effects of reality
borrowed from their costume.

"The very certainty of finding all these folk seated at or among the
tables every day at the same hours invested them at length in my eyes
with a sort of spectacular interest as it were; there was something
theatrical, something unearthly about them.

"Whenever, in after times, I have gone through museums of old furniture
in Paris, London, Munich, or Vienna, with the gray-headed custodian
who shows you the splendors of time past, I have peopled the rooms with
figures from the Collection of Antiquities. Often, as little schoolboys
of eight or ten we used to propose to go and take a look at the
curiosities in