“Tanagra!”
And shout of Tanagra gave way to
“Marcelle!”
The swords flashed.
Gérôme’s students passed, giving place to other schools, each in its pageant striving to express the ideals of the art which inspired its chosen master. The rude groups of the barbaric men who wore but the shaggy skins of animals; the wild groups of Merovingian and Carlovingian Franks; the dandified figures of the bewigged and heavy-booted court of the great Louis; the powdered and patched and silken-habited gentlemen of the last Louis; the large-lapelled, long-tail-coated and high-stocked dandies of the Revolution: they all passed with their triumphal cars, and drew the loud acclamations of the boisterous revellers.
The splendid procession circled round the great hall, passed the tribune of the judges to the thrash of the martial music; round and round again. But amidst the frantic din it was soon known that Gérôme’s students had won the honours of the night.
As the gladiators and warriors passed the judges’ tribune the last time before the procession broke up to join the revellers, the twelve judges stood up in solemn silence, and saluted the goddess of war and the exquisite figure of the young woman who sat in all the triumph of her beauty.
They stood whilst Gérôme’s students passed. And as they so stood in strange dignity, the emblems of imperial Rome above them, the battle-axes bound in faggots, and the motto Death to Tyrants emblazoned between, as they so stood beneath the row of heads that dripped the blood of the dead tyrants, there floated across the ages some whisper of the eternal struggle of life, of the survival of the fittest, and of the crowning mystery of the incarnation of man through the beauty of woman....
As the clocks struck three, there was a rush of revellers towards the procession of waiters who appeared in white aprons carrying chairs and tables and plates and glasses.
In a trice the place was a great banqueting-hall, white with the napery of a hundred tables.