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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
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