The valet de chambre succeeded just then, after some little
difficulty, in drawing his master into the ante-chamber to whisper to
him:
"The neighbors are all at their windows, complaining of the racket,
sir."
"If noise alarms them, why don't they lay down straw before their
doors?" was Taillefer's rejoinder.
Raphael's sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and abrupt,
that his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly hilarity.
"You will hardly understand me," he replied. "In the first place, I
must admit that you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was
about to throw myself into the Seine, and you would like to know, no
doubt, my motives for dying. And when I proceed to tell you that by an
almost miraculous chance the most poetic memorials of the material
world had but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical
interpretation of human wisdom; whilst at this minute the remains of
all the intellectual treasures ravaged by us at table are comprised in
these two women, the living and authentic types of folly, would you be
any the wiser? Our profound apathy towards men and things supplied the
half-tones in a crudely contrasted picture of two theories of life so
diametrically opposed.
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