He had then placed it on his table and contemplated it in silence. The top of the skull was polished and blunt, the front narrow, the bones small and apparently not having attained their full development. It was therefore a youthful head, the head of an adolescent cut down at the moment, when life completely unfolds itself to hope; while the elliptical shape of the lower maxillary, the small and similarly-shaped teeth, the slight separation of the nasal bones, a few long hairs still adhering to the occiput, clearly indicated its feminine origin.
"A young girl!" murmured Marcel, "a young girl! beautiful perhaps; loved without doubt … and there is what remains. Ah! if he who was pleased to kiss your lips, could see your dreadful laugh."
And, after he had meditated a long while, he went to his bed, took the plaster virgin from its pedestal, and taking in his two hands the skull, he put it in its place between the serge curtains.
And when the fever seized him, when he was burning with all the flames which the fiery simoom of passion breathed on him, and he felt the frenzy taking possession of his pillow, he turned towards the wall and looked at this new companion. Sometimes a moon-beam came and lighted up the hideous skull and played in the gloomy cavities of its sightless eyes. The head then seemed to become animate and its bare teeth gave an infernal grin.
This was his remedy for love.
But we grow used to everything. Custom destroys sensations. Death and its mysteries, the horrible, and all its threatening shapes soon present nothing to our eyes but worn-out pictures. He accustomed himself to contemplate without emotion this lugubrious ruin. As before, the frenzy seized him and shook him before the skull. It did more. It clothed it again with flesh. It planted long hairs upon that shining, yellow forehead. It placed in the hollow orbits large eyes full of love; it hid the wasted cartillages under quivering nostrils, and upon that horrible jaw it laid rosy lips and a sweet mouth, like a maiden's first kiss. And it is thus that it appeared to him in the shadow, wrapped in the curtains of his bed, like a modest girl who hides herself from sight.
"Oh! sweet phantom, return to life," he said. "Take again thy body adorned with its graces and with its charms; come, clothed in thy sixteen years."
And he stretched his arms towards the enchanting vision, while the death's-head, with its bare jaw, gave its eternal grin.
He woke and found himself kneeling near his bed, facing the wreck of humanity.
Horror soiled him. His empty room was filled with spectres. He saw hell-hags with death's-heads sporting and swarming on his bed. At the same time, little sharp, hasty, shrill knocks shook his window.