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Updated: May 12, 2025
I have to explain how I was first taken with the malady of the age. I was at table, at a great supper, after a masquerade. About me were my friends, richly costumed, on all sides young men and women, all sparkling with beauty and joy; on the right and on the left exquisite dishes, flagons, splendor, flowers; above my head was an obstreperous orchestra, and before me my loved one, whom I idolized.
Nevertheless, it was a singular but irresistible effect; the presence of Zenobia caused our heroic enterprise to show like an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up men and women were making a play-day of the years that were given us to live in. I tried to analyze this impression, but not with much success.
At first they had all felt horribly ashamed at being caught in the foolish disguises of a festival, by an event that had only too much the character of a funeral. Many of them would have already gone back and dressed in clothes that were more funereal or at least more formal. But somehow at the moment this seemed like a second masquerade, more artificial and frivolous than the first.
The rencontre in the streets of London the scene at the masquerade the meeting at Bologne the storm the shipwreck the sinking vessel the appearance at that moment of the man himself the subsequent visions of mingled fever and insanity: all, all now swept across my mind, as for the last time I gazed on the remains of him who was powerless henceforth for ever.
Yet this wretched husk of squalor spent thought upon appearances; many houses in it wore a false front to seem as if they were two stories high. There they stood, rearing their pitiful masquerade amid a fringe of old tin cans, while at their very doors began a world of crystal light, a land without end, a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis.
Was he not a child then? You answer, "Yes, but not like other children." I ask, "Did he not look like other children?" If he looked like them and was not like them, the whole was a deception, a masquerade at best. I say he was a child, whatever more he might be. God is man, and infinitely more. Our Lord became flesh, but did not become man. He took on him the form of man: he was man already.
It was a masquerade warehouse to all appearance. A dark-eyed damsel of the nation was standing at the dark and grimy counter, strewed with old feathers, old yellow hoots, old stage mantles, painted masks, blind and yet gazing at you with a look of sad death-like intelligence from the vacancy behind their sockets.
The person who came with the mandate had orders not to quit the presence of young Coigney, but bring him directly; by which means he was deprived of all opportunity of sending his excuses to madame de Olonne, who coming to the masquerade big with expectation of seeing her favourite lover, and finding him, as she imagined, engaged with others, and wholly regardless of herself, was seized with the most violent jealousy; and not able to continue in a place where she had received so manifest a slight, desired mademoiselle de Freville, her confidant and companion, to upbraid him with his inconstancy; which request she complied with in the manner already related, and which gave mademoiselle Charlotta such matter of disquiet.
A third valet came up to a third stranger, saying: "Sire, believe me, your Majesty ought not to stay here any longer. I am going to get everything ready." And immediately he disappeared. Candide and Martin did not doubt that this was a masquerade of the Carnival. Then a fourth domestic said to a fourth master: "Your Majesty may depart when you please." Saying this he went away like the rest.
He had donned the gypsy masquerade because he did not want to be taken for what he was, and he had succeeded only too well. He had played into their hands. They would, of course, claim, in the event of trouble with the United States, that they had supposed him to be what his costume proclaimed him, and they would be able to make good their pretense with a very decent appearance of candor.
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