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Updated: June 20, 2025
Have pity on your humble slave, and do not compel him to an action so contrary to the maxims of virtue. No man should look upon what does not belong to him. We know that the immortals always punish those who through imprudence or audacity surprise them in their divine nudity. Nyssia is the loveliest of all women; you are the happiest of lovers and husbands.
The subterfuge, ostrich-like, woman-like, finally was adopted; and meeting Sir Jacques in Babylon Lane she managed to greet him civilly, employing her mother's poor state of health as an excuse for discontinuing her visits to Hatton Towers. But if Flamby's passionate spirit had had its way Sir Jacques that day must have met the fate of Candaules at the hands of this modern Nyssia.
But, alas! a saffron-coloured flammeum pitilessly masked the face of Nyssia, who seemed embarrassed, veiled though she was, at finding so many eyes fixed upon her, and frequently signed to a slave behind her to lower the parasol of ostrich plumes, and thus conceal her yet more from the curious gaze of the crowd.
His hand, tracing vague contours in the air, seemed to be sketching the outlines for some picture, and he would have remained thus for whole hours if Nyssia, soon becoming weary of her rôle of model, had not reminded him in chill and disdainful tones that such amusements were unworthy of royal majesty and contrary to the holy laws of matrimony.
The chastity of Nyssia was avenged, and the dream of Gyges accomplished. Thus ended the dynasty of the Heracleidæ, after having endured for five hundred and five years, and commenced that of the Mermnades in the person of Gyges, son of Dascylus.
Their invincible virginity seemed to bid love defiance. The cheeks of Nyssia, which no human gaze had ever profaned, save that of Gyges on the day when the veil was blown away, possessed a youthful bloom, a tender pallor, a delicacy of grain, and a downiness whereof the faces of our women, perpetually exposed to sunlight and air, cannot convey the most distant idea.
'Sire, replied Gyges in a voice trembling with emotion, 'no human creature is worthy to compare with Nyssia. It is not the pearl fillet of queens which should adorn her brows, but only the starry crown of the immortals. 'I well knew that your ice must melt at last in the fires of that sun. Now can you comprehend my passion, my delirium, my mad desires?
And long after, when deep below the slime of deluges, and beneath the dust of ruined cities, the men of future ages should find a fragment of that petrified shadow of Nyssia, they would cry: "Behold, how the women of this vanished world were formed!" And they would erect a temple wherein to enshrine the divine fragment. But I have naught save a senseless admiration and a love that is madness!
Amid this dark ocean of humanity, wherein confusedly move so many defective or misshapen beings, so many forms incomplete or degraded, so many types of bestial ugliness, wretched outlines of nature's experimental essays, I have found beauty, pure, radiant, without spot, without flaw, the ideal made real, the dream accomplished, a form which no painter or sculptor has ever been able to translate upon canvas or into marble I have found Nyssia!
Nyssia made a sign for Gyges to come forth from his retreat; and laying her finger upon the breast of the victim, she directed upon her accomplice a look so humid, so lustrous, so weighty with languishment, so replete with intoxicating promise, that Gyges, maddened and fascinated, sprang from his hiding-place like the tiger from the summit of the rock where it has been couching, traversed the chamber at a bound, and plunged the Bactrian poniard up to the very hilt in the heart of the descendant of Hercules.
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