Each
disowned his mistress of the night before; the women looked wan and
discolored, like flowers trampled under foot by a passing procession.
The men who scorned them looked even more horrible. Those human faces
would have made you shudder. The hollow eyes with the dark circles
round them seemed to see nothing; they were dull with wine and
stupefied with heavy slumbers that had been exhausting rather than
refreshing. There was an indescribable ferocious and stolid bestiality
about these haggard faces, where bare physical appetite appeared shorn
of all the poetical illusion with which the intellect invests it. Even
these fearless champions, accustomed to measure themselves with
excess, were struck with horror at this awakening of vice, stripped of
its disguises, at being confronted thus with sin, the skeleton in
rags, lifeless and hollow, bereft of the sophistries of the intellect
and the enchantments of luxury. Artists and courtesans scrutinized in
silence and with haggard glances the surrounding disorder, the rooms
where everything had been laid waste, at the havoc wrought by heated
passions.
Demoniac laughter broke out when Taillefer, catching the smothered
murmurs of his guests, tried to greet them with a grin.
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