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It is an architectural extravaganza, a bacchanalia of color and design, as fantastic and unreal as the city of a dream. The steep-pitched, curiously shaped roofs are covered with tiles of every color peacock blue, vermilion, turquoise, emerald green, burnt orange; no inch of exposed woodwork has escaped the carver's cunning chisel; everywhere gold has been laid on with a spendthrift hand.
The people hoot and hiss them, the lower classes sing songs in derision of them, and play them all manner of tricks, and the whole scene is one of incredible noise, uproar, and confusion, more worthy of some pagan bacchanalia than a procession of Christian people. All the country-folk from five or six leagues around Aix pour into the town on that day to do honour to God.
It was not long however before they became clamorous for spiritous liquors; and the evening presented such a bacchanalia, including the women and the children, as I never before witnessed. Drinking made them quarrelsome, and one of the men became so infuriated, that he would have killed another with his bow, had not the master of the post immediately rushed in and taken it from him.
I splashed in the brook, finding its waters strangely warm, rustled through the grasses, my head back, chin out, hands extended as one makes his way through a house at night. There were no sounds except the tinkle of the sulphurous stream: successive bends in the cañon wall had shut off even the faintest echoes of the bacchanalia on the beach. The way seemed much longer than by daylight.
Suppose I made a large picture The Death of Pentheus the king in Euripides' tragedy of the Bacchæ who in his efforts to put down the Bacchanalia was slain by the enraged Bacchantes. Suppose I put this one in the foreground.... But then it seemed a pity to spoil such a lovely face with a look of rage.... Well, anyway, let me have a sketch first, and see what inspiration came to me.
As well as the festivities, there were the various mysteries, such as the Eleusinia, the Dionysia and the Bacchanalia. These were conducted by the priests who moulded religious beliefs and guarded their secrets. The mysteries were of the utmost importance and the most sacred of religious conceptions were here dramatized.
First they have little trumpets, such as the Grecians used to have at their Bacchanalia to call upon their gods withal. Others go before them playing upon harps, which they call Levites, whether so named from Lusius or Evius, either word agrees with Bacchus.
"The most disgusting object in the world is a man who drinks!" came a cold voice behind them, and they turned to see The Lily standing back of them, and frowning at the scene across. Bill turned to greet her, holding out his hand, and his broad shoulders shut out the view of Bacchanalia.
Black-eyed, crimson-lipped, oval-faced, Madame de Mailly was one of those women who "with cheeks on fire, and blood astir, eyes large and lustrous as the eyes of Juno, with bold carriage and in free toilettes, step forward out of the past with the proud and insolent graces of the divinities of some Bacchanalia."
The one day a Lower is just as good as an Upper. The one day how many shares you got makes no difference. Everybody has everything." "Sure, sure, sure," Joe sighed. "The modern equivalent of the Roman Bacchanalia. Election day in the West-world when no one, for just that one day, is freer than anyone else." "Well, what's wrong with that?" The other was all but belligerent.
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