‘A young man, prince?’
‘A young man dressed as a girl. There’s nothing surprising in that. Your celebrated dancer Duport came all the way from Paris to Vienna in woman’s clothes. He alighted from his post-chaise at the Princesse Jean de Lichtenstein’s, where he danced the whole of the evening, still in woman’s clothes, and to the admiration of that circle of admirers, all of whom went to applaud him next evening at the theatre at the Court, where, still in female attire, he danced in the ballet of Achille à Scyros. Look you here, my boy: there are disguises elsewhere than at routs, and inasmuch as you have taken to collect the trifles I wrote during the spring of my life, as well as in its fall, I’ll read you to-morrow one of the transgressions of my youth, entitled, Le Roman d’une Nuit. Only my extreme youth can be the excuse for that.’
He referred once more to society; to the society he had bitterly stigmatised as ungrateful. ‘I shall always consider myself fortunate in having been a witness of that unique spectacle, the Congress. In that varied crowd I look upon each individual as a separate page of the great book of society. Believe me, man is not as bad as he is painted. Woe to the misanthropic moralists who care to look only at the sombre side of him. They are the painters who only study nature at night.’
Amidst this boisterous, bustling throng, where people looked for their friends without finding them, though they might be elbowing each other, two female dominos came up to me and drew me away from the prince. One took my hand. ‘Why were you in such a hurry to leave us?’ she asked. The voice, which sounded altogether natural, was entirely unfamiliar to me. ‘When a man addresses verses to a woman,’ she went on, ‘he assuredly does not expect her to travel three hundred leagues for the sake of thanking the author.’
‘Gentle mask, Vienna is three hundred leagues from Paris, an equal distance from Naples, and as much from St. Petersburg, and in all these places I have unfortunately addressed verses to ladies. I must therefore ask you to be more explicit, for unless you are, I shall be travelling a long while in search of my unknown heroine.’
‘Very well, let us say it was at St. Petersburg, and that Lafont set them to music.’
‘In that case I should not be sufficiently conceited to aspire to thanks from the object of my poetry.’
‘Why not, if the verses bestowed caused pleasure?’
‘Or,’ added her companion, who had hitherto been silent, ‘if the proof of the pleasure is the thanks offered.’
It has been said with truth that the whole destiny of a life is decided in an instant. I immediately recognised the voice, which I had only heard once before. The strange and brilliant dream of a night was about to be reproduced a second time with all its former illusions. I did not know what to say; the liberty of speech, tacitly admitted under cover of a mask, only added to my confusion. ‘Have you nothing to say?’ asked the same voice. ‘Sweet mask,’ I replied, ‘the timid bird may sing at sunrise, only the eagle dare fixedly look at the sun in its zenith.’