"Well, barely."

These last remarks were made in my neighborhood by persons whom I did
not know, and who passed out of hearing just as I was summarizing in
one last thought my reflections, in which black and white, life and
death, were inextricably mingled. My wandering imagination, like my
eyes, contemplated alternately the festivities, which had now reached
the climax of their splendor, and the gloomy picture presented by the
gardens. I have no idea how long I meditated upon those two faces of
the human medal; but I was suddenly aroused by the stifled laughter of
a young woman. I was stupefied at the picture presented to my eyes. By
virtue of one of the strangest of nature's freaks, the thought half
draped in black, which was tossing about in my brain, emerged from it
and stood before me personified, living; it had come forth like
Minerva from Jupiter's brain, tall and strong; it was at once a
hundred years old and twenty-two; it was alive and dead. Escaped from
his chamber, like a madman from his cell, the little old man had
evidently crept behind a long line of people who were listening
attentively to Marianina's voice as she finished the cavatina from
_Tancred_. He seemed to have come up through the floor, impelled by
some stage mechanism. He stood for a moment motionless and sombre,
watching the festivities, a murmur of which had perhaps reached his
ears. His almost somnambulistic preoccupation was so concentrated upon
things that, although he was in the midst of many people, he saw
nobody. He had taken his place unceremoniously beside one of the most
fascinating women in Paris, a young and graceful dancer, with slender
figure, a face as fresh as a child's, all pink and white, and so
fragile, so transparent, that it seemed that a man's glance must pass
through her as the sun's rays pass through flawless glass. They stood
there before me, side by side, so close together, that the stranger