But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.  When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.  This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste.  A strong and lofty wall girdled it in.  This wall had gates of iron.  The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.  They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within.  The abbey was amply provisioned.  With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion.  The external world could take care of itself.  In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.  The prince had provided all the 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 example, in blue —­ and vividly blue were its windows.  The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple.  The third was green throughout, and so were the casements.  The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange —­ the fifth with white —­ the sixth with violet.  The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue.  But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations.  The panes here were scarlet