guests, one of the
waiters had come to whisper to his fellows, and point with expressive
gesture to the ceiling. But his comrades had taken small account of his
observations or fears, not wishing, doubtless, to disturb the guests,
whose mad gayety seemed ever on the increase.

"Who can doubt now of the superiority of our manner of treating this
impertinent Cholera? Has he dared even to touch our sacred battalion?"
said a magnificent mountebank-Turk, one of the standard-bearers of the
masquerade.

"Here is all the mystery," answered another. "It is very simple. Only
laugh in the face of the plague, and it will run away from you."

"And right enough too, for very stupid work it does," added a pretty
little Columbine, emptying her glass.

"You are right, my darling; it is intolerably stupid work," answered the
Clown belonging to the Columbine; "here you are very quiet, enjoying
life, and all on a sudden you die with an atrocious grimace. Well! what
then? Clever, isn't it? I ask you, what does it prove?"

"It proves," replied an illustrious painter of the romantic school,
disguised like a Roman out of one of David's pictures, "it proves that
the Cholera is a wretched colorist, for he has nothing but a dirty green
on his pallet. Evidently he is a pupil of Jacobus, that king of classical
painters, who are another species of plagues."

"And yet, master," added respectfully a pupil of the great painter, "I
have seen some cholera patients whose convulsions were rather fine, and
their dying looks first-rate!"

"Gentlemen," cried a sculptor of no less celebrity, "the question lies in
a nutshell. The Cholera is a detestable colorist, but a good draughtsman.
He shows you the skeleton in no time. By heaven! how he strips off the
flesh!--Michael Angelo would be nothing to him."

"True," cried they all, with one voice; "the Cholera is a bad colorist,
but a good draughtsman."

"Moreover, gentlemen," added Ninny Moulin, with comic gravity, "this
plague brings with it a providential lesson, as the great Bossuet would
have said."

"The lesson! the lesson!"

"Yes, gentlemen; I seem to hear a voice from above, proclaiming: 'Drink
of the best, empty your purse, and kiss your neighbor's wife; for your
hours are perhaps numbered, unhappy wretch!'"

So saying, the orthodox Silenus took advantage of a momentary absence of
mind on the part of Modeste, his neighbor, to imprint on the blooming
cheek of LOVE a long, loud kiss. The exam