The Masque of the Red Death
THE "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal,
or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal --- the redness and the horror of blood.
There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores,
with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the
victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his
fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the
incidents of half an hour.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions
were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted
friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep
seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent
structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty
wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought
furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither
of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The
abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to
contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to
grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were
buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there
was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red
Death."
It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the
pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand
friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.
It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which
it was held. There were seven --- an imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites
form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on
either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was
very different; as might have been expected from the duke's love of the bizarre. The
apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one
at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel
effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window
looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These
windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue
of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was
hung, for example, in blue --- and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber
was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was
green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with
orange --- the fifth with white --- the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely
shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls,
