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"In that case," said Willis, "the wine is poured out, and, such as it is, we must drink it." Was he on his way to the Capitol or to the Gemoniae? The solution of this question became, for the moment, of greater importance to Willis than the "to be or not to be" of Hamlet to the State of Denmark.
The gemoniae are Elysian. The chimerical thread of celestial unions floats 'neath the darkest vault of the human Erebus and binds despairing hearts to hearts that are monstrous. Manon through the infinite sends to Cartouche a smile ineffable as that with which Everallin entranced Fingal.
Paris has a capital, the Town-Hall, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Aventine, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a temple of the winds, opinion; and it replaces the Gemoniae by ridicule.
Rome left some poetry to her sewer, and called it the Gemoniae; Paris insulted hers, and entitled it the Polypus-Hole. Science and superstition were in accord, in horror. The Polypus hole was no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend.
The Romans were undoubtedly a barbarous people, who delighted in horrible spectacles. They viewed with pleasure the dead bodies of criminals dragged through the streets, or thrown down the Scalae Gemoniae and Tarpeian rock, for their contemplation. Their rostra were generally adorned with the heads of some remarkable citizens, like Temple-Bar, at London.
I might observe, that the streets were often encumbered with the putrefying carcasses of criminals, who had been dragged through them by the heels, and precipitated from the Scalae Gemoniae, or Tarpeian rock, before they were thrown into the Tyber, which was the general receptacle of the cloaca maxima and all the filth of Rome: besides, the bodies of all those who made away with themselves, without sufficient cause; of such as were condemned for sacrilege, or killed by thunder, were left unburned and unburied, to rot above ground.
At length, upon the Scalae Gemoniae, he was tormented and put to death in lingering tortures, and then dragged by a hook into the Tiber. XVIII. He perished with his brother and son , in the fifty-seventh year of his age , and verified the prediction of those who, from the omen which happened to him at Vienne, as before related , foretold that he would be made prisoner by some man of Gaul.
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