When she awoke, a gay sunbeam played in the window curtain, the web of which it pierced with a thousand points of light, and came familiarly to the bed to flit like a golden butterfly round her lovely shoulders which it skimmed in passing with a luminous kiss. Happy sunbeam that the gods might have envied!

Cleopatra asked to get up in an expiring voice like a sick child’s; two of her women raised her in their arms and laid her preciously on the ground on a huge tiger skin whose claws were of gold and whose eyes were carbuncles. Charmion wrapped her in a calasiris of linen whiter than milk, and put her feet in tatbebs of cork on the soles of which had been drawn, in token of contempt, two grotesque figures representing two men of the races of Nahasi and Nahmou, bound hand and foot, so that Cleopatra deserved literally the epithet of ‘she who treads on the peoples’ which the royal cartouches give her.

It was the hour for the bath. Cleopatra went there with her women.

Cleopatra’s baths were built in vast gardens filled with mimosas, carob-trees, aloes, lemon-trees, Persian apple-trees, the luxuriant freshness of which made a delicious contrast with the sterility of the surroundings; immense terraces sustained groves of verdure, and raised the flowers up to the sky by gigantic stairways of rose granite; vases of Pentelic marble spread like huge lilies on the side of each step, and the plants they contained, seemed only their pistils; chimæras caressed by the chisels of the most able Greek sculptors, of a less repulsive appearance than the Egyptian sphinxes with their surly faces and their morose attitudes, were lying at ease on the turf all studded with flowers, like graceful white greyhounds on a drawing- room carpet; there were charming figures of women, their noses straight, their foreheads smooth, their mouths little, their arms delicately rounded, their throats round and pure, with ear-pendants, collars, and ornaments, capricious and adorable, bifurcating into a fish’s tail like the woman of whom Horace spoke, unfurling on the wings of a bird, widening into the flanks of a lioness, twisting into a volute of foliage, according to the fantasy of the artist or the suitability of the architectural position: a double row of these delicious monsters bordered the alley that led from the palace to the bath-chamber.

At the end of this alley a large swimming pool was reached with four stairways of porphyry; through the transparency of the chrystalline water the steps could be seen going down to the bottom sanded with powdered gold; women, ending in sheaths like caryatides, spouted from their breasts a stream of perfumed water, which fell into the pool in a silver dew, dimpling the clear mirror with little crackling drops. In addition to this use the caryatides had in addition the other of supporting on their heads an entablature adorned with nereids and tritons in bas-relief and supplied with a bronze ring to which to attach the silken cords of the awning. Beyond the gateway was seen greenery, damp and blue-tinted, shady bowers of coolness, a bit of the vale of Tempe transplanted into Egypt. The famous gardens of Semiramis were nothing compared to these.

We shall not speak of the seven or eight other chambers at different temperatures, with their hot and cold vapours, their boxes of perfume, their cosmetics, their oils, their pumice-stone, their horsehair gloves, and all the refinements of the ancient art of bathing pushed to such a high degree of voluptuousness and luxury.

Cleopatra arrived, her hand on Charmion’s shoulder; she had walked at least thirty steps alone! a mighty effort! an enormous fatigue! A slight shade of rose, spreading under the transparent skin of her cheeks, freshened their passionate pallor; on her temples, fair as amber, was seen a network of blue veins; her level brow, low like the brows of the olden times, but perfect in its roundness and form, joined by an irreproachable line to a severe straight nose, like a cameo, intersected by rosy nostrils that palpitated at the least emotion like the nostrils of a tigress in love; the little mouth, round, very close to the nose, had its lip scornfully arched; but an unbridled voluptuousness, an incredible ardour for life, gleamed in the red splendour and the moist lustre of the lower lip. Her eyes had straight lids, the eyebrows narrow and almost without inflection. We shall not try to give an idea of them; it was a fire, a languor, a glittering limpidity, enough to turn the head of Anubis’ dog himself; each look of her eyes was a poem finer than that of Homer or Mimnermus; an imperial chin, full of force and domination, worthily finished off this charming profile.