THE DEFIANCE.
Two or three times, without being remarked by the guests, one of the waiters had come to whisper to his fellows, and point with expressive gesture to the ceiling.But his comrades had taken small account of his observations or fears, not wishing, doubtless, to disturb the guests, whose mad gayety seemed ever on the increase.
"Who can doubt now of the superiority of our manner of treating this impertinent Cholera? Has he dared even to touch our sacred battalion?"
said a magnificent mountebank-Turk, one of the standard-bearers of the masquerade.
"Here is all the mystery," answered another."It is very simple.Only laugh in the face of the plague, and it will run away from you."
"And right enough too, for very stupid work it does," added a pretty little Columbine, emptying her glass.
"You are right, my darling; it is intolerably stupid work," answered the Clown belonging to the Columbine; "here you are very quiet, enjoying life, and all on a sudden you die with an atrocious grimace.Well! what then? Clever, isn't it? I ask you, what does it prove?"
"It proves," replied an illustrious painter of the romantic school, disguised like a Roman out of one of David's pictures, "it proves that the Cholera is a wretched colorist, for he has nothing but a dirty green on his pallet.Evidently he is a pupil of Jacobus, that king of classical painters, who are another species of plagues."
"And yet, master," added respectfully a pupil of the great painter, "I have seen some cholera patients whose convulsions were rather fine, and their dying looks first-rate!"
"Gentlemen," cried a sculptor of no less celebrity, "the question lies in a nutshell.The Cholera is a detestable colorist, but a good draughtsman.He shows you the skeleton in no time.By heaven! how he strips off the flesh!--Michael Angelo would be nothing to him."
"True," cried they all, with one voice; "the Cholera is a bad colorist, but a good draughtsman."
"Moreover, gentlemen," added Ninny Moulin, with comic gravity, "this plague brings with it a providential lesson, as the great Bossuet would have said."