In a sumptuous palace of Ferrara, one winter evening, Don Juan Belvidero was entertaining a prince of the house of Este.  In those days a banquet was a marvelous affair, which demanded princely riches or the power of a nobleman.  Seven pleasure-loving women chatted gaily around a table lighted by perfumed candles, surrounded by admirable works of art whose white marble stood out against the walls of red stucco and contrasted with the rich Turkey carpets.  Clad in satin, glittering with gold and laden with gems which sparkled only less brilliantly than their eyes, they all told of passions, intense, but of various styles, like their beauty.  They differed neither in their words nor their ideas; but an expression, a look, a motion or an emphasis served as a commentary, unrestrained, licentious, melancholy or bantering, to their words.

One seemed to say:  “My beauty has power to rekindle the frozen heart of age.”  Another:  “I love to repose on soft cushions and think with rapture of my adorers.”  A third, a novice at these fetes, was inclined to blush.  “At the bottom of my heart I feel compunction,” she seemed to say.  “I am a Catholic and I fear hell; but I love you so—­ah, so dearly—­that I would sacrifice eternity to you!” The fourth, emptying a cup of Chian wine, cried:  “Hurrah, for pleasure!  I begin a new existence with each dawn.  Forgetful of the past, still intoxicated with the violence of yesterday’s pleasures, I embrace a new life of happiness, a life filled with love.”

The woman sitting next to Belvidero looked at him with flashing eyes.  She was silent.  “I should have no need to call on a bravo to kill my lover if he abandoned me.”  Then she had laughed; but a comfit dish of marvelous workmanship was shattered between her nervous fingers.

“When are you to be grand duke?” asked the sixth of the prince, with an expression of murderous glee on her lips and a look of Bacchanalian frenzy in her eyes.

“And when is your father going to die?” said the seventh, laughing and throwing her bouquet to Don Juan with maddening coquetry.  She was an innocent young girl who was accustomed to play with sacred things.

“Oh, don’t speak of it!” cried the young and handsome Don Juan.  “There is only one immortal father in the world, and unfortunately he is mine!”

The seven women of Ferrara, the friends of Don Juan, and the prince himself gave an exclamation of horror.  Two hundred years later, under Louis XV, well-bred persons would have laughed at this sally.  But perhaps at the beginning of an orgy the mind had still an unusual degree of lucidity.  Despite the heat of the candles, the intensity of the emotions, the gold and silver vases, the fumes of wine, despite the vision of ravishing women, perhaps there still lurked in the depths of the heart a little of that respect for things human and divine which struggles until the revel has drowned it in floods of sparkling wine.  Nevertheless, the flowers were already crushed, the