Both young men and girls seemed to have forgotten the fatigues of a ball, begun at eleven o’clock in the evening, and finished at six in the morning; and all these couples, joyous as they were amorous and indefatigable, laughed, ate, and drank, with youthful and Pantagruelian ardor, so that, during the first part of the feast, there was less chatter than clatter of plates and glasses.

The Bacchanal Queen’s countenance was less gay, but much more animated than usual; her flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes announced a feverish excitement; she wished to drown reflection, cost what it might.  Her conversation with her sister often recurred to her, and she tried to escape from such sad remembrances.

Jacques regarded Cephyse from time to time with passionate adoration; for, thanks to the singular conformity of character, mind, and taste between him and the Bacchanal Queen, their attachment had deeper and stronger roots than generally belong to ephemeral connections founded upon pleasure.  Cephyse and Jacques were themselves not aware of all the power of a passion which till now had been surrounded only by joys and festivities, and not yet been tried by any untoward event.

Little Rose-Pompon, left a widow a few days before by a student, who, in order to end the carnival in style, had gone into the country to raise supplies from his family, under one of those fabulous pretences which tradition carefully preserves in colleges of law and medicine—­Rose Pompon, we repeat, an example of rare fidelity, determined not to compromise herself, had taken for a chaperon the inoffensive Ninny Moulin.

This latter, having doffed his helmet, exhibited a bald head, encircled by a border of black, curling hair, pretty long at the back of the head.  By a remarkable Bacchic phenomenon, in proportion as intoxication gained upon him, a sort of zone, as purple as his jovial face, crept by degrees over his brow, till it obscured even the shining whiteness of his crown.  Rose-Pompon, who knew the meaning of this symptom, pointed it out to the company, and exclaimed with a loud burst of laughter:  “Take care, Ninny Moulin! the tide of the wine is coming in.”

“When it rises above his head he will be drowned,” added the Bacchanal Queen.

“Oh, Queen! don’t disturb me; I am meditating, answered Dumoulin, who was getting tipsy.  He held in his hand, in the fashion of an antique goblet, a punch-bowl filled with wine, for he despised the ordinary glasses, because of their small size.

“Meditating,” echoed Rose-Pompon, “Ninny Moulin is meditating.  Be attentive!”

“He is meditating; he must be ill then!”

“What is he meditating? an illegal dance?”

“A forbidden Anacreontic attitude?”

“Yes, I am meditating,” returned Dumoulin, gravely; “I am meditating upon wine, generally and in particular—­wine, of which the immortal Bossuet”—­Dumoulin had the very bad habit of quoting Bossuet when he was drunk—­“of which the immortal Bossuet says (and he was a judge of good liquor):  ’In wine is courage, strength joy, and spiritual fervor’—­when one has any brains,” added Ninny Moulin, by way of parenthesis.