Thus,
at my right was the depressing, silent image of death; at my left the
decorous bacchanalia of life; on the one side nature, cold and gloomy,
and in mourning garb; on the other side, man on pleasure bent. And,
standing on the borderland of those two incongruous pictures, which
repeated thousands of times in diverse ways, make Paris the most
entertaining and most philosophical city in the world, I played a
mental _macedoine_[*], half jesting, half funereal. With my left foot
I kept time to the music, and the other felt as if it were in a tomb.
My leg was, in fact, frozen by one of those draughts which congeal one
half of the body while the other suffers from the intense heat of the
salons--a state of things not unusual at balls.
[*] _Macedoine_, in the sense in which it is here used, is a game, or
rather a series of games, of cards, each player, when it is his
turn to deal, selecting the game to be played.
"Monsieur de Lanty has not owned this house very long, has he?"
"Oh, yes! It is nearly ten years since the Marechal de Carigliano sold
it to him."
"Ah!"
"These people must have an enormous fortune."
"They surely must.
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