The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (4.1895)

I I 2

Wladislaw’s Advent

Dufour, his coat off, his waistcoat and shirt unbuttoned, his head
rolled weakly back upon the gilded wood-scroll of his Louis
Ouinze chair : his face flushed and swollen, strangely broadened,
coarsened and undone, with sick, loose expressions rolling over it
as shallow water rolls above a stone ; he had in his hands an old
lute, a Studio property, from which he had been picking poor
detached, discordant notes.

There were other men, with wild arrested meniment in their
faces, the merriment of licence. Mixed among them, tangling
like the serpents and reptiles in an allegorical picture, were women
of whom the drapery or the bareness seemed indifferently lewd.

One had fainted with a glass at her lips, and the splash of
spilled liquor was on her neck and dripping from her chin. No
one heeded her.

Another had dashed her head upon the table, her hands were
clutched in her hair, shaking with a palsy of terror ; and from her
arose the sobs which were no more than the dull moaning of a
beast in labour.

One other, in a dress all Paris would have recognised as being
the orange ballet-muslins in which Dufour had painted his
celebrated u Coquelicot,” was lying with long white arms spread
on the back of a chair 3 above her low black satin bodice the
waves of her dead-white breast were heaving convulsively ; her
red hair blazed from under the live fantastic orange-poppy horns
that spread out from her head ; her clever, common little face was
twitching to recover a vinous courage, the black eyes were blinking,
the crooked lines of her mouth—more fascinating than any
fancied bow-curve—were moving in irresponsible striving to open
on one side, as they had a habit of doing, and let out some daring
phrase.

All that they saw, these miserable revellers, was the white

figure