All the strange figures that a freakish fancy could
suggest leaped and danced and shouted in a rapture of mirth-satyrs
and follies, clowns and devils wheeled wildly by, waving torches,
clashing cymbals, or screaming at the top of their voices, while
sedater spirits, masked and muffled in mantles of sombre hue, moved
through the tumultuous throng and found their abated pleasure in
mystification and intrigues.
Villon had a mask in his girdle. He put it on and pushing into the
press allowed himself to drift hither and thither with the eddying
currents of pleasure. His fantastic imagination took fire from the
strange shapes and sounds about him. The sense of being in a dream,
which had never deserted him from the first moment of his awakened
consciousness in the rose garden, clung closely about him on this
night, and the jocund figures around him flitted by as unreal as the
phantoms of a noon-tide sleep.
Suddenly his attention was arrested by the sound of a voice that
seemed familiar to him. A man habited like a pilgrim from the Holy
Land, in long hood and gabardine of grey, and with the pilgrim's
cockleshell on his shoulder, had met another masker, habited like
himself.
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