A Winter Amid the Ice, and Other Thrilling Stories

mes, preserving only a sort of passing stupefaction, they had none the less undergone a remarkable exaltation,

delicately fashioned shoe, another her best mantle. Memory returned to these worthy people, and with it a certain shame for their unjustifiable agitation. It seemed to them an orgy in wh

ed on the field of battle. As for having it publicly claimed by Jean Mistrol, the town-crier,--no, it would not do. It w

rked more during this morning than it had probably worked before for forty years. The worthy magistrate recalled to his mind all the incidents of the incomprehensible performance. He connected them with the

oolmasters; and ail, if my memory serves me,--all of us were assailed by this excess of furious folly! But what was there in that infernal music? It is inexplicable! Yet I certainly ate or drank nothing which could put me into such a state. No; yesterday I had for dinner a sl

tes. Besides, tranquillity had been restored in the public mind, and with tranquillity, forgetfulness of the strange scenes of the theatre. The newspapers avoide

was observable that, at bottom, the character and temperament of the people changed little by litt

thodical people of former days. So, too, when they remained at home, some working with their hands and others with their heads,--these doing nothing, those thinking nothing,--their private life was silent, inert, vege

ngenious physiologists of the day, if the inhabitants of Quiquendone did not change in their home life, th

arrassing before they had been together an hour. In two hours the discussion degenerated into an angry dispute. Heads became heated, and personalities were used. Even at church, during the sermon, the faithful could not listen to Van Stabel, the minister, in patience, and he threw himself about in the pulpit and lectured his flock with fa

citement, which was absent from private houses, quickly revealed itself in public edifices; and he asked himself, not without a certain anxiety, what would happen if this infection should ever develop itself in the family mansions, and if the epidemic--this was the word h

arrested? How check these goaded temperaments? My office would be no longer a sinecure, and the council

the theatre, the church, the town-hall, the academy, the market, into private houses,

peared in the house o

ed, some months before, a loan of thirty thousand francs, three quarters of which had been subscribed; and to

tulips; a slow and measured dance, from time to time, perhaps a minuet; sometimes a waltz, but one of those German waltzes which achieve a turn and a half per minute, and during which the dancers hold each other as far apart as their arms will permit,--such is the usu

g punches? Why, towards the middle of the evening, did a sort of mysterious intoxication take possession of the guests? Why did the minuet become a jig? Why did the orchestra hurry with its harmonies? Why did the candles, just as at the theatre, burn with unwonted refulgence? What electric current i

, but he could not control it or fly from it, and he felt a kind of intoxication entering his own brain. All his physical and emotional faculties in

ll breasts. They danced--really danced. The feet were agitated by increasing frenzy. The faces became as pu

rand! Then a galop, an infernal galop, which lasted an hour without any one being able to stop it, whirled off, in its windings, across the halls, the drawing-rooms, the antechambers, by the staircases, from the cellar to the garret of the opulent mansion, the young men and young girls, the fathers and mothers, people of every age, of

o longer

n in her dreams the fiery commissary, enfolding her in an i