Devil, his master, who loves men’s souls better than their bodies, and actually traffics in the former by choice, the hellish slave-driver!

Witty, high-bred, and aristocratic, but for the nonce as recklessly gay as pages of the household—when there was a king’s household and pages of it—they exhibited a scintillating brilliance, a dash, a verve, a brio, that were beyond compare. They felt themselves in better form than they had ever been in their most palmy days; they felt a new and mysterious power in their inmost being which they had never suspected the existence of before.

Joy at this discovery, a sensation of tripled intensity in the vital powers, still more the physical incitements, so stimulating to highly strung temperaments, the flashing lights, the penetrating odour of many flowers dying in an atmosphere overheated with the emanations of all these lovely bodies, the sting of heady wines, all acted together. Then the mere thought of this supper, which had just the piquancy of naughtiness the fair Neapolitan asked for in her lemonade to make it perfectly delicious, the intoxicating notion of complicity in this wild, wicked feast—not that it condescended for an instant to any of the vulgar incidents of the Regent’s suppers; it remained throughout true to the tone of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the nineteenth century, and of all these lovely bosoms, with hearts beating beneath that had been under fire and still loved to tempt the fray, not one lost so much as a pin or a knot of ribbon—all these things together helped to tune the magic harp which all of them carried within themselves, and to stretch the strings wellnigh to breaking point, till they quivered again in passionate octaves and ineffable diapasons of emotion.…A curious page it will make of his Secret Memoirs this, if Ravila ever writes them!…As I told the Marquise Guy de Ruy, I was not at the supper myself, and if I am able to report some of its incidents and the narrative with which it concluded, I owe them to no other than Ravila himself who, faithful to the traditional indiscretion of all the Don Juan breed, took the trouble one evening to tell me the whole story.

III

It was getting late—or, rather, early—and dawn was near. On the ceiling, and at one spot in the pink silk curtains of the boudoir, otherwise hermetically closed, there grew and increased a splash of opalescent light, like an ever-enlarging eye, the eye of day, as if fain to look in through the crevice and see what was doing in the brilliantly lighted room. A certain languor was in the air, assailing these champions of the Round Table, these merry-makers who had been so animated but a moment ago.

The crisis is familiar at every supper party, the instant when, wearied with the gaiety and emotional stress of the night, everything seems to languish at once, drooping heads, burning cheeks, reddened or paled by excitement, tired eyes under heavy, darkened lids, even the candles themselves, which seem to quiver and grow larger in the many-branched candelabra, fiery flowers with stems of chiselled bronze and gold.

The conversation, hitherto general and vivacious, a game of shuttlecock, where each had put in her stroke, had grown fragmentary and broken, and no distinct word was now audible amid the general confusion of voices which, with their aristocratic tones, mingled in a pretty babble, like birds at break of day on the confines of a wood, when one of them—a high-pitched voice, imperious, almost insolent, as a duchess’s should be—cried suddenly above all the rest to the Comte de Ravila what was evidently the conclusion of a previous whispered conversation between the two, which none of the others, each engaged in talk with her immediate neighbour, had heard.

‘You are the reputed Don Juan of our day: well! you should tell us the history of the conquest of all others which most flattered your pride as a ladies’ man, and which you judge, in the light of the present moment, the greatest love of your life.…’

And the question, no less than the voice in which it was uttered, instantly cut short the scattered conversations that were buzzing round the table, and imposed a sudden silence.

The voice was that of the Duchesse de * * *—I will not lift the veil of asterisks, but you will very likely know who it was when I tell you she is the fairest of all fair women, both complexion and hair, with the