The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue-and vividly blue were its windows. 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. There was a sharp turn at the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor of which pursued the windings of the suite. 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 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 extant is scarcely impeded. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think. The external world could take care of itself. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. 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 crenellated abbeys. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.īut Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. Blood was its Avatar and its seal-the madness and the horror of blood. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. The red death had long devastated the country.

The masque of the red death short story