ked for a _bavaroise_, as they were
on milk diet.

They pointed out to each other the gas flaming from the jets fashioned
in the form of a broken shin-bone.

"A little patience, my friends," said a sort of manager, who was dressed
in deep mourning. "Before long we will adjourn to the Cave of Death!"

The drinkers in white cravats shouted. Bernardet experienced, on the
contrary, what Mme. Bernardet would have called a "creepy" sensation.
Seasoned as he was to the bloody and villainous aspect of crime, he felt
the instinctive shrinking of a healthy and level-headed bourgeois
against these drolleries of the brain-diseased upper class and the
pleasantries of the blase decadents.

At a certain moment, and after an explanation given by the manager, the
gas was turned off, and the lovers in the gondolas, the guitar players,
the singers of Spanish songs, the dancers infatuated with the Moulin
Rouge, changed suddenly in sinister fashion. In place of the blond heads
and rosy cheeks, skulls appeared; the smiles became grins which showed
the teeth in their fleshless gums. The bodies, clothed in doublets, in
velvets and satins, a moment ago, were made by some interior
illumination to change into hideous skeletons. In his mocking tones the
manager explained and commented on the metamorphosis, adding to the
funeral spectacle the pleasantry of a buffoon.

"See! diseased Parisians, what you will be on Sunday!"

The light went out suddenly; the skeletons disappeared; the sighing
lovers in the gondolas on the lagoons of Venice reappeared; the
Andalusian sweethearts again gazed into each other's eyes and sang their
love songs. Some of the women laughed, but the laughs sounded
constrained.

"Droll! this city of Paris," Bernardet thought. He sat there, leaning
back against the wall, where verses about death were printed among the
white tears--as in those lodges of Free Masons where an outsider is shut
up in order to give him time to make his will--when the door opened and
Bernardet saw a tall young man of stalwart and resolute mien enter. A
black, curly beard surrounded his pale face. As he entered he cast a
quick glance around the hall, the air of which was rather thick with
cigar smoke. He seemed to be about thirty years of age, and had the air
of an artist, a sculptor, or a painter, together with something military
in his carriage. But what suddenly struck Bernardet was his hat, a large
gray, felt hat, with a very wide brim, like