time, ever gave me such a thrill of terror as I used to feel when I
watched the automaton movements of those bodies sheathed in whalebone.
The paint on actors' faces never caused me a shock; I could see below
it the rouge in grain, the rouge de naissance, to quote a comrade at
least as malicious as I can be. Years had leveled those women's faces,
and at the same time furrowed them with wrinkles, till they looked
like the heads on wooden nutcrackers carved in Germany. Peeping
in through the window-panes, I gazed at the battered bodies, and
ill-jointed limbs (how they were fastened together, and, indeed,
their whole anatomy was a mystery I never attempted to explain); I saw
the lantern jaws, the protuberant bones, the abnormal development of
the hips; and the movements of these figures as they came and went
seemed to me no whit less extraordinary than their sepulchral
immobility as they sat round the card-tables.

"The men looked gray and faded like the ancient tapestries on the
wall, in dress they were much more like the men of the day, but even
they were not altogether convincingly alive. Their white hair, their
withered waxen-hued faces, their devastated foreheads and pale eyes,
revealed their kinship to the women, and neutralized any effects of
reality borrowed from their costume.

"The very certainty of finding all these folk seated at or among the
tables every day at the same hours invested them at length in my eyes
with a sort of spectacular interest as it were; there was something
theatrical, something unearthly about them.

"Whenever, in after times, I have gone through museums of old
furniture in Paris, London, Munich, or Vienna, with the gray-headed
custodian who shows you the splendors of time past, I have peopled the