One of Cleopatra's Nights by Théophile Gautier Read Free Book Online Page A

condition of
things which takes place but once in a thousand years, Cleopatra might
some day love you. Well, what you thought impossible is actually about
to happen. I will transform your dream into a reality. It pleases me,
for once, to secure the accomplishment of a mad hope. I am willing to
inundate you with glories and splendors and lightnings. I intend that
your good fortune shall be dazzling in its brilliancy. You were at the
bottom of the ladder. I am about to lift you to the summit, abruptly,
suddenly, without a transition. I take you out of nothingness, I make
you the equal of a god, and I plunge you back again into nothingness;
that is all. But do not presume to call me cruel or to invoke my pity;
do not weaken when the hour comes. I am good to you. I lend myself to
your folly. I have the right to order you to be killed at once; but
since you tell me that you love me, I will have you killed to-morrow
instead. Your life belongs to me for one night. I am generous. I will
buy it from you; I could take it from you. But what are you doing on
your knees at my feet? Rise, and give me your arm, that we may return to
the palace."
Chapter VI
    Our world of to-day is puny indeed beside the antique world. Our
banquets are mean, niggardly, compared with the appalling sumptuousness
of the Roman patricians and the princes of ancient Asia. Their ordinary
repasts would in these days be regarded as frenzied orgies, and a whole
modern city could subsist for eight days upon the leavings of one supper
given by Lucullus to a few intimate friends. With our miserable habits
we find it difficult to conceive of those enormous existences, realizing
everything vast, strange, and most monstrously impossible that
imagination could devise. Our palaces are mere stables, in which
Caligula would not quarter his horse. The retinue of our wealthiest
constitutional king is as nothing compared with that of a petty satrap
or a Roman proconsul. The radiant suns which once shone upon the earth
are forever extinguished in the nothingness of uniformity. Above the
dark swarm of men no longer tower those Titanic colossi who bestrode the
world in three paces, like the steeds of Homer; no more towers of
Lylacq; no giant Babel scaling the sky with its infinity of spirals; no
temples immeasurable, builded with the fragments of quarried mountains;
no kingly terraces for which successive ages and generations could each
erect but one step, and from whence some dreamfully reclining prince
might gaze on the face of the world as upon a map unfolded; no more of
those extravagantly vast cities of cyclopæan edifices, inextricably
piled upon one another, with their mighty circumvallations, their
circuses roaring night and day, their reservoirs filled with ocean brine
and peopled with whales and leviathans, their colossal stairways, their
super-imposition of terraces, their tower-summits bathed in clouds,
their giant palaces, their aqueducts, their multitude-vomiting gates,
their shadowy necropoli. Alas! henceforth only plaster hives upon
chessboard pavements.
    One marvels that men did not revolt against such confiscation of all
riches and all living forces for the benefit of a few privileged ones,
and that such exorbitant fantasies should not have encountered any
opposition on their bloody way. It was because those prodigious lives
were the realizations by day of the dreams which haunted each man by
night, the personifications of the common ideal which the nations beheld
living symbolized under one of those meteoric names that flame
inextinguishably through the night of ages. To-day, deprived of such
dazzling spectacles of omnipotent will, of the lofty contemplation of
some human mind whose least wish makes itself visible in actions
unparalleled, in enormities of granite and brass, the world becomes
irredeemably and hopelessly dull. Man is no longer represented in the
realization of his imperial fancy.
    The story which we are writing, and the great name of Cleopatra