Sincerity and loyalty shone on his face in characters so transparent that Cleopatra immediately abandoned this thought, and fixed on the young Egyptian a less severe and irritated look; she found him handsome.

‘Well, then, what reason drove you to a place where you could meet nothing but death?’

‘I love you,’ said Meïamoun in a low voice but distinctly; for his courage came back, as it does in all extreme situations which nothing can make worse.

‘Ah!’ said Cleopatra, leaning towards him and seizing his arm with a brusque and sudden movement. ‘It is you who shot the arrow with the papyrus roll; by Oms, the god of the lower world, you are a very daring wretch! I recognize you now; for a long time I have seen you wandering like a plaintive shade round the spots I inhabit. You were at the procession of Isis, at the panegyry of Hermonthis; you followed the royal cange. Ah! you must have a queen! You have no mediocre ambitions; you expected doubtless to have your reward at once. Certainly I am going to love you. Why not?’

‘Queen,’ answered Meïamoun with an air of grave melancholy, ‘do not jest. I am out of my wits, it is true. I have deserved death, that is true too; be human, kill me.’

‘No, I have the whim to be merciful to-day. I give you your life.’

‘What do you expect me to do with life? I love you.’

‘Well! you shall be satisfied; you shall die,’ answered Cleopatra. ‘You have dreamed a strange extravagant dream; your desires have passed in imagination an unapproachable threshold, you thought that you were Cæsar or Mark Antony; you loved the queen! In certain hours of delirium you have believed that in the suite of circumstances that occur only once in a thousand years, Cleopatra would one day love you. Well, what you believed impossible is going to be accomplished; I am going to make your dream a reality; it pleases me, for once, to crown a mad hope. It is my wish to flood you with splendour, with sunbeams and lightning. It is my wish that your fortune be dazzling. You were at the bottom of the wheel, I am going to put you on top, brusquely, suddenly, without transition. I take you from nothingness: I make you the equal of a god, and I replunge you into nothingness; that’s all, but do not come to me and call me cruel, implore my pity; do not weaken when the hour strikes. I am kind, I lend myself to your folly; I would have the right to have you killed at once; but you say that you love me; I shall have you killed to- morrow; your life for a night. I am generous, I buy it from you, I could have taken it. But what are you doing at my feet? Rise and give me your hand to go into the palace.’

VI

Our world is indeed small beside the old world, our feats are shabby beside the fearful sumptuousness of the Roman patricians and the princes of Asia; their ordinary meals would pass to-day for unlicensed orgies, and the whole of a modern city would live for a week on the dessert of Lucullus when he supped with some intimate friends. We, with our miserable habits, have difficulty in conceiving those enormous existences, that realized all recklessness, strangeness, and the most monstrous impossibilities that the imagination can invent. Our palaces are stables where Caligula would not have wanted to stable his horse; the richest of our constitutional kings does not keep up the state of a petty satrap or a Roman proconsul. The radiant suns that shone on the earth are for ever extinguished in the nothingness of uniformity; there rise no more on the black ant-heap of men those colossi in Titan’s shape who crossed the world in three steps like Homer’s horses; there are no more towers of Lylacq, no more giant Babels scaling the sky with infinite spirals, no more inordinate temples made with quarters of mountains, or royal terraces that each century and each people can only raise one layer higher, whence the prince, leaning meditatively on his elbow, can see the whole face of the world like an unrolled map; no more of those confused cities, composed of an inextricable heap of Cyclopean edifices, with their deep circumvallations, their circuses bellowing night and day, their reservoirs filled with sea water, and peopled with leviathans and whales, their colossal flights of stairs, their superimposed terraces, their towers with the coping bathed