"Nor is this all," said Monte Fato, opening a door to reveal a distinctly ancien régime winding stairway which, with its steps uneven, narrow, and treacherous, looked as if it might crack if any durst tread thereon. "You imagine an Elrond descending step by step, of a dark and stormy night, that stair with some lugubrious burden that he has haste to remove from the eyes of man, if not those of Érou!"
Mme. de Sacqueville-Danglars collapsed in the arms of M. de Villefaramir, who himself had to lean against the wall for support.
"Ah, mon Érou, madame, what ails you?" cried De Brie. "You become pale!"
"Nothing," she said, with an effort. "The Count has a manner of narrating these horrors, that gives them an air of reality – like Trolquien's spurious treatise on volcanoes."
"Oh, mon Érou, oui," said Monte Fato with a smile. "It is entirely a matter of the imagination. Could one not equally easily picture this chamber as the good and honest chamber of a mother with a family of innocent smurves? This bed with its purple curtains and standing stones as the bed visited by Nienne, goddess of accouchements? This stairway as that by which the father brought the infant to its mother in the evening?"
At this, the baroness fainted altogether.
"How could I have forgotten my flacon!" said the Count.
