A moment's consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton's
Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a
hideous blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were
kept up with wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like
the explosion of fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room
were strewn like a battlefield with the insensible and incapable.
Wine, pleasure, and dispute had heated the atmosphere. Wine and love,
delirium and unconsciousness possessed them, and were written upon all
faces, upon the furniture; were expressed by the surrounding disorder,
and brought light films over the vision of those assembled, so that
the air seemed full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as
in the luminous paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre
forms flitted through it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart it.
Groups of interlaced figures blended with the white marbles, the noble
masterpieces of sculpture that adorned the rooms.

Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious clearness in
their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and faint thrill of
animation, it was yet almost impossible to distinguish what was real
among the fantastic absurdities before them, or what foundation there
was for the impossible pictures that passed unceasingly before their
weary eyes. The strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering
heavens, the fervid sweetness caught by faces in our visions, and
unheard-of agility under a load of chains,--all these so vividly, that
they took the pranks of the orgy about them for the freaks of some
nightmare in which all movement is silent, and cries never reach the
ear. The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little
difficulty, in drawing his master into the ante-chamber to whisper to
him: