Then, turning upon me his phosphorescent eyes, he exclaimed in a voice strident as the miauling of a cat that has swallowed a fish-bone: “Old Pharaoh will not be pleased--he loved his daughter, that dear man!” “You speak as if you were his contemporary; old as you are, you do not date back to the Pyramids of Egypt,” I answered laughingly from the shop door. I went home, well content with my acquisition. In order to put it to use as soon as possible, I placed the foot of the divine Princess Hermonthis upon a heap of papers, scribbled over with verses, an undecipherable mosaic work of erasures; articles just begun; letters forgotten and mailed in the table-drawer--an error which often occurs with absent-minded people. The whole effect was charming, bizarre, and romantic. Well satisfied with this embellishment, I went down into the street with the becoming gravity and pride of one who feels that he has the ineffable advantage over all the passers-by whom he elbows, of possessing a fragment of the Princess Hermonthis, daughter of Pharaoh. I looked upon as sovereignly ridiculous all those who did not possess, like myself, a paper-weight so notoriously Egyptian; and it seemed to me that the true occupation of every man of sense was to have a mummy’s foot upon his desk. Happily, my meeting some friends distracted me from my infatuation with the recent acquisition; I went to dinner with them, for it would have been difficult for me to dine by myself. When I came back in the evening, my brain slightly confused by a few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of Oriental perfume delicately tickled my olfactory nerves: the heat of the room had warmed the sodium carbonate, bitumen, and myrrh in which the paraschites, who cut open the bodies of the dead, had bathed the corpse of the princess; it was a perfume both sweet and penetrating, a perfume that four thousand years had not been able to dissipate. The dream of Egypt was Eternity: her odors have the solidity of granite, and endure as long. I soon drank to fulness from the black cup of sleep: for an hour or two all remained opaque. Oblivion and nothingness inundated me with their sombre emptiness. Presently my mental obscurity cleared; dreams commenced to graze me softly in their silent flight. The eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld my chamber precisely as it was. I might have believed myself to be awake, but a vague perception told me that I slept and that something fantastic was about to take place. The odor of the myrrh had intensely increased, and I felt a slight headache, which--with great reasonableness--I attributed to several glasses of champagne that we had drunk to the unknown gods, and our future success.