The appalling resonance of the arched ceiling, which hurled the sounds like shadows against the opposite wall, blended all the voices in a single one—all the words in a confused murmur.
The marquis was not deaf, but he had the sensitive hearing peculiar to old men, who can hear very distinctly sounds that are moderately loud and words clearly articulated, but whom an uproar, a hurly-burly of voices disturbs and confuses to no purpose.
Thus he distinguished intonations, nothing more: sometimes that of a hoarse, loud voice, which seemed to be telling a story; sometimes the refrain of a ballad abruptly interrupted by threatening accents; and then a loud voice which seemed to ridicule and imitate the others, and which raised a tempest of uproarious and brutal laughter.
Sometimes there were long monologues, then dialogues between two or three, and suddenly shouts of anger or merriment which resembled roars. Indeed, it might be that those people were speaking a language which the marquis did not know.
He persuaded himself that they were simply a band of vagrants or mountebanks out of employment, living by marauding, and waiting under cover of that ruin for the spring to come, or perhaps in hiding there because of some crime.
That laughter, those strange costumes outlined on the wall like Chinese ghosts, those long harangues, those animated dialogues were connected perhaps with the study of some burlesque art.
"If I were nearer to them," he thought, "I might be amused; no man is ever ill received in any company, however bad it may be, if he enters it offering his purse with a good grace."
So he took up his lantern and was preparing to descend, when the conversations, songs and laughter changed into cries of animals, so lifelike, so perfectly imitated, that one would have said that it was a whole barnyard in commotion. There were the ox, the ass, the horse, the goat, the rooster, the duck and the lamb, all braying and crowing together. Then they all ceased, as if to listen to the barking of a pack of hounds, the blast of the horn—all the typical noises of a hunt.
Was it a game? Did it occur to the actors to look at themselves on the wall? They did not seem to be imitating the actions of the beasts whose cries they mimicked.
In the midst of the uproar a child cried out in a shrill voice, perhaps to do as the others did, perhaps because he was frightened in his sleep; and Bois-Doré saw the shadow of a tiny person pass, with gestures like those of a monkey. Next there came a huge head crowned by a sort of plumed helmet, with an absurd nose outlined against the bright wall; then a long-haired head which seemed to wear a priest's cap, and which conversed with a long shadow that stood for many minutes as motionless as a statue.