The fresh air brought her round a little.

"Where are we going to?" she implored. "Let us be quick: I can walk no more. You see that I don't resist, I am nice to you. But let us find a bed as soon as possible, otherwise I shall drop down in the street."

IV

THE ORGIE AT BACCHIS'S

When she once more found herself at Bacchis's door, she was penetrated by the delicious sensation produced by the respite from desire and the silence of the flesh. Her forehead no longer ached. Her mouth no longer twitched. She felt nothing but an intermittent pain which seized her from time to time in the small of the back. She mounted the steps and crossed the threshold.

As soon as Chrysis had left the room the orgie had developed like a flame.

Other friends entered, to whom the twelve dancing girls fell an easy prey. Forty tattered wreaths strewed the ground with flowers. A leathern bottle of Syracusan wine had burst in a corner, and its golden flood flowed under and around the table.

Philodemos was by the side of Faustina.

He had torn her robe and was singing her the verses he had made in her honour.

"O feet," he said, "O sweet thighs, deep reins, round croup, cloven fig, hips, shoulders, b.r.e.a.s.t.s, mobile neck; O all ye things that charm me, warm hands, expert movements, active tongue! You are a Roman, you are a Roman, you are too dark and you do not sing the poems of Sappho; but Perseus was the lover of the Indian Andromeda." [1]

Meanwhile, Seso lay flat upon her belly on the table in a pile of crushed fruit. She was completely overpowered by the fumes of Egyptian wine, and as she lay dipping the nipple of her right breast in a pond of snow-cooled wine, she kept repeating with a comical pathos:

"Drink, my little darling. You are thirsty. Drink, my little darling.

Drink. Drink. Drink."

Aphrodisia, still a slave, triumphed in the midst of a circle of men, and was celebrating her last night of servitude by an extravagant debauch. In obedience to the tradition of all Alexandrian orgies, she had begun by giving herself to three lovers at once; but her task did not end there, and according to the law of slaves who became courtesans, she was expected to prove by an incessant zeal, lasting all night, that she had not usurped her new dignity.

Standing alone behind a curtain, Naukrates and Phrasilas discussed courteously the respective value of Arcesilas and Carneades.

At the end of the hall, Myrtocleia protected Rhodis against the over-zealous enterprises of one of the guests.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

As soon as the two Ephesians saw Chrysis enter, they rose to meet her.

"Come away, my Chryse. Theano stays: but we are going.

"I stay too," said tho courtesan. And she lay down on her back upon a great bed covered with roses.

A din of voices and the clattering of money falling on the floor attracted her attention. It was Theano who, in order to parody her sister, had bethought her to caricature the "Fable of Danae," simulating a mad ecstasy of voluptuous delight every time a golden coin penetrated her. The child's daring impiety amused all the guests, for they were no longer in the days when the thunderbolt would have exterminated those who scoffed at the Immortal One. But the sport degenerated, as might have been foreseen. A clumsy fellow hurt the poor little thing, and she fell to weeping noisily.

It was necessary to invent a new amus.e.m.e.nt to console her. Two dancing-girls pushed into the centre of the room an immense silver-gilt bowl filled to the top with wine. Then somebody seized Theano by the feet, and made her drink with her head downwards. This convulsed her with a fit of laughter which she was unable to master.

This idea was such a success that everybody crowded around, and when the flute-girl was set on her feet again, the sight of her little face purple with congestion and dripping with wine, produced such a general hilarity that Bacchis said to Selene:

"A mirror! a mirror! let her see herself!"

The slave brought a bronze mirror. "No, not that one. The mirror of Rhodopis. She merits it."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chrysis sprang up with a bound. The blood spurted to her cheeks, then retired again, and she remained perfectly pale, with the beatings of her heart battering her breast, and her eyes fixed on the door through which the slave had disappeared.

That instant was to decide her whole life. Her last hope was either to vanish or be realised. The fete continued all around her. An iris wreath, thrown from somewhere or other, fell upon her lips. A man broke a little phial of perfume over her hair. It ran down too quickly and wetted her shoulders. The splashes of wine from a full tankard into which somebody had thrown a pomegranate spotted her silk tunic and penetrated to the skin. She bore all the traces of the orgie magnificently.

The slave who had gone out did not return.

Chrysis remained stone-pale, motionless as a sculptured G.o.ddess. The rhythmic and monotonous wail of a woman in travail of love not far away marked the pa.s.sage of time for her. It seemed to her that this woman had been moaning thus since the night before. She could have twisted something, broken her fingers, shouted.

At last Selene came back, empty-handed.

"The mirror?" asked Bacchis.

"It . . . It has gone . . . it . . . has been . . . stolen," stammered the servant.

Bacchis uttered a cry so piercing that all ceased speaking, and a frightful silence brusquely interrupted the tumult.

Men and women crowded round her from all parts of the vast chamber, leaving a little s.p.a.ce in the centre which was occupied by the distracted Bacchis and the kneeling slave.

"What! What!" she shrieked.

And as Selene did not answer, she seized her violently by the neck:

"You have stolen it yourself! You have stolen it yourself! Answer, answer! I will loosen your tongue with the whip, miserable little b.i.t.c.h!"

Then a terrible thing happened. Beside herself with fear, the fear of suffering, the fear of death, the most instant terror she had ever known, the child exclaimed hurriedly:

"It is Aphrodisia! It is not I! it is not I!"

"Your sister!"

"Yes, yes," said the mulatto woman; "it is Aphrodisia who has taken it."

And they dragged their sister, who had just fallen into a fainting fit, before Bacchis.

[1] Philodeme AP. V. 132.