The Magic Skin | Page 9

the place presented a confused picture in which every
achievement, human and divine, was mingled. Crocodiles, monkeys,
and serpents stuffed with straw grinned at glass from church windows,
seemed to wish to bite sculptured heads, to chase lacquered work, or to
scramble up chandeliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon's portrait by
Mme. Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The
beginnings of the world and the events of yesterday were mingled with
grotesque cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a
republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star
above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look

longingly out of Latour's pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried to
guess the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her.
Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons
had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life;
porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, old
salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to feudal times. A carved ivory
ship sped full sail on the back of a motionless tortoise.
The Emperor Augustus remained unmoved and imperial with an
air-pump thrust into one eye. Portraits of French sheriffs and Dutch
burgomasters, phlegmatic now as when in life, looked down pallid and
unconcerned on the chaos of past ages below them.
Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of
its learning, some example of its art. Nothing seemed lacking to this
philosophical kitchen-midden, from a redskin's calumet, a green and
golden slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol, to
the soldier's tobacco pouch, to the priest's ciborium, and the plumes that
once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was rendered
yet more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a multitude of
confused reflections of various hues, by the sharp contrast of blacks
and whites. Broken cries seemed to reach the ear, unfinished dramas
seized upon the imagination, smothered lights caught the eye. A thin
coating of inevitable dust covered all the multitudinous corners and
convolutions of these objects of various shapes which gave highly
picturesque effects.
First of all, the stranger compared the three galleries which civilization,
cults, divinities, masterpieces, dominions, carousals, sanity, and
madness had filled to repletion, to a mirror with numerous facets, each
depicting a world. After this first hazy idea he would fain have selected
his pleasures; but by dint of using his eyes, thinking and musing, a
fever began to possess him, caused perhaps by the gnawing pain of
hunger. The spectacle of so much existence, individual or national, to
which these pledges bore witness, ended by numbing his senses--the
purpose with which he entered the shop was fulfilled. He had left the
real behind, and had climbed gradually up to an ideal world; he had
attained to the enchanted palace of ecstasy, whence the universe
appeared to him by fragments and in shapes of flame, as once the future
blazed out before the eyes of St. John in Patmos.

A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark and
luminous, far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, in whole
generations. Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose from her sands in the
form of a mummy swathed in black bandages; then the Pharaohs
swallowed up nations, that they might build themselves a tomb; and he
beheld Moses and the Hebrews and the desert, and a solemn antique
world. Fresh and joyous, a marble statue spoke to him from a twisted
column of the pleasure-loving myths of Greece and Ionia. Ah! who
would not have smiled with him to see, against the earthen red
background, the brown-faced maiden dancing with gleeful reverence
before the god Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase?
The Latin queen caressed her chimera.
The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed,
the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
Strong with the might of Arabic spells, the head of Cicero evoked
memories of a free Rome, and unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus
Livius. The young man beheld Senatus Populusque Romanus; consuls,
lictors, togas with purple fringes; the fighting in the Forum, the angry
people, passed in review before him like the cloudy faces of a dream.
Then Christian Rome predominated in his vision. A painter had laid
heaven open; he beheld the Virgin Mary wrapped in a golden cloud
among the angels, shining more brightly than the sun, receiving the
prayers of sufferers, on whom this second Eve Regenerate smiles
pityingly. At the touch of a mosaic, made of various lavas from
Vesuvius and Etna, his fancy fled to the hot tawny south of Italy. He
was present at Borgia's orgies, he roved among the Abruzzi, sought for
Italian love intrigues, grew ardent