In the last hall, there is waiting for us behind the windows a motionless and terrible company: twenty-eight _macabre_ dolls, of human size, standing up straight in a military row with their elbows touching each other. They all wear that high pear-shaped turban that has not been in use for a century, and which is only to be seen upon the catafalques of distinguished personages, in the twilight of mortuary kiosks, or carved upon the tombs--so that this kind of a turban is for me absolutely associated with the idea of death. Until the beginning of this century, whenever a sultan died, they brought here a doll clothed in the ceremonial robes of the dead sovereign, they placed marvellous arms in his belt, put on his turban, and his magnificent jewelled aigrette,--and it remained here forever covered with this eternally wasted wealth. The twenty-eight Sultans who succeeded each other from the capture of Constantinople until the end of the Seventeenth Century are standing here in their imperial robes in facsimile; slowly has the sombre and sumptuous assembly increased, new funeral dolls came one by one to range themselves in line with the old ones, who had awaited them for hundreds of years, sure of seeing them at last--and they are now touching each other’s elbows. Their long robes are of the strangest brocades, with great mysterious designs whose tints are dimmed by time; priceless poignards with large handles made of a single precious stone, rust, notwithstanding the care, in the silken belts; it even seems that the enormous diamonds of the aigrettes have lost some of their fire, and shine with a yellowish and dulled light. And this unheard of luxury, all powdered with dust, is sad to look upon. Fabulously magnificent, the dolls with the high coiffure, objects of so much human covetousness guarded there behind the double doors of iron, useless and dangerous, see the seasons, years, reigns, revolutions and centuries pass by with the same immobility and the same silence, with scarcely any daylight through the gratings of the old windows and in total darkness after the sun sets. Each one bears his name, written like a common name upon a faded ticket--illustrious names that were formerly terrible: Mourad the Conqueror, Soliman the Magnificent, Mohammed and Mahmoud. I believe that these dolls give me the most terrifying lesson of fragility and nothingness. THE DUOMO, THE LEANING TOWER. THE BAPTISTERY AND THE CAMPO-SANTO OF PISA H. A. TAINE