"On my word, signor, you are mad," said Michel, with a shrug.
"You are right," retorted the unknown, "for I stand here listening to the idle talk of a fool."
The words had no sooner passed his lips than Michel rushed at him with a sudden determination to strike him. But, fearing lest he might strike a woman, for the stranger's sex still seemed to him very doubtful, he paused; and he congratulated himself when he saw that problematical personage turn upon his heel and vanish so quickly that Michel could not determine in what direction he had gone, and concluded that he had been dreaming again.
"Surely I am beset by phantoms to-night," he said to himself. But as soon as he found himself in presence of real mortals, he recovered the notion of reality. He was asked for his card of admission. He gave his name.
"Ah! Michel," said the door-keeper, "I did not know you. How fine you are! You look like an invited guest. Go in, my boy, and pay close attention to the lights. The pretty stuff that you have hung over our heads would take fire so quickly! It seems that you are coming in for a deal of praise. Everybody says that the figures are done by a master hand."
Michel was offended at being addressed thus familiarly by a servant, offended at being assigned to the duties of fireman, and secretly delighted nevertheless at having obtained a triumph which was already the talk of the antechamber.
He glided into the crowd, hoping to pass through unnoticed and to reach some secluded corner where he could see and hear at his ease; but there were so many people in the great ball-room that they brushed against one another and trod on one another's feet. He was carried to the other end of the vast structure before he realized the impetus that the compact mass had imparted to him; and thus he arrived at the foot of the great staircase. Not until then was he able to stop, gasping for breath, and open his eyes, nostrils, ears, and mind, to the enchanting spectacle of the fête.
Being somewhat above the flower-bedecked benches, he could see at a glance both the dances in progress about the fountains, and the spectators who jostled and squeezed one another to watch the dances. The noise and glare and commotion were well adapted to dazzle and bewilder a more mature brain than Michel's. What an array of lovely women, marvellous jewels, white shoulders and resplendent head-dresses! What majestic or alluring charms! What merriment, feigned or genuine! What airs of languor, counterfeited or ill dissembled!
Michel was intoxicated for an instant; but when his eyes began to see more clearly and to separate the countless details of the scene,—when he asked himself which of all those women would be, in his mind, an ideal model,—he looked up at the ideal figures he had painted in the ceiling, and was better satisfied, vain-glorious youth, with his own work than with God's.
He had dreamed of perfect beauty. He believed that he had found it in the creations of his brush. He was probably mistaken; for it is impossible to create a divine image without giving it human features, and nothing on earth is blessed with absolute perfection. However that may have been, Michel, still faltering and awkward in his art in several respects, had approached as nearly as possible to perfect beauty in his types. That was what impressed all those who examined his work; above all, that was what impressed him when he sought among real persons the personification of his ideas. Among the whole number he saw only two or three women who seemed truly beautiful, and even those two or three he would have liked to hold against his canvas, in order to take away from one or give to another a certain outline or a certain coloring, wherein they seemed to him to lack fullness or purity.