"Oh! don't talk about it," cried Don Juan, the young and handsome
giver of the banquet. "There is but one eternal father, and, as
ill luck will have it, he is mine."

The seven Ferrarese, Don Juan's friends, the Prince himself, gave
a cry of horror. Two hundred years later, in the days of Louis
XV., people of taste would have laughed at this witticism. Or was
it, perhaps, that at the outset of an orgy there is a certain
unwonted lucidity of mind? Despite the taper light, the clamor of
the senses, the gleam of gold and silver, the fumes of wine, and
the exquisite beauty of the women, there may perhaps have been in
the depths of the revelers' hearts some struggling glimmer of
reverence for things divine and human, until it was drowned in
glowing floods of wine! Yet even then the flowers had been
crushed, eyes were growing dull, and drunkenness, in Rabelais'
phrase, had "taken possession of them down to their sandals."

During that brief pause a door opened; and as once the Divine
presence was revealed at Belshazzar's feast, so now it seemed to
be manifest in the apparition of an old white-haired servant, who
tottered in, and looked sadly from under knitted brows at the
revelers. He gave a withering glance at the garlands, the golden
cups, the pyramids of fruit, the dazzling lights of the banquet,
the flushed scared faces, the hues of the cushions pressed by the
white arms of the women.

"My lord, your father is dying!" he said; and at those solemn
words, uttered in hollow tones, a veil of crape seemed to be
drawn over the wild mirth.