The first time I had a close view of one of those famous gatherings called theatrical masked balls I heard the debauchery of the Regency spoken of, and the time when a queen of France was disguised as a flower merchant. I found there flower merchants disguised as camp-followers. I expected to find libertinism there, but in fact I found none at all. It is only the scum of libertinism, some blows and drunken women lying in deathlike stupor on broken bottles. The first time I saw debauchery at table I heard of the suppers of Heliogabalus and of the philosophy of Greece which made the pleasure of the senses a kind of religion of nature. I expected to find oblivion or something like joy; I found there the worst thing in the world, ennui trying to live, and an Englishman who said: "I do this or that, therefore I amuse myself. I have spent so many pieces of gold, therefore I experience so much pleasure." And they wear out their life on that grindstone. The first time I saw courtesans I heard of Aspasia who sat on the knees of Alcibiades while discussing philosophy with Socrates. I expected to find something bold and insolent, but gay, free, and vivacious, something of the sparkle of champagne; I found a yawning mouth, a fixed eye and hooked hands. The first time I saw titled courtesans I read Boccaccio and Andallo; tasting of everything, I read Shakespeare. I had dreamed of those beautiful triflers; of those cherubim of hell. A thousand times I had drawn those heads so poetically foolish, so enterprising in audacity, heads of harebrained mistresses who spoil a romance with a glance and who walk through life by waves and by shocks like the undulating sirens; I thought of the fairies of the modern tales who are always drunk with love if not with wine. I found, instead, writers of letters, arrangers of precise hours who practise lying as an art and cloak their baseness under hypocrisy, whose only thought is to give themselves and forget. The first time I looked on the gaming table I heard of floods of gold, of fortunes made in the quarter of an hour, and of a lord of the court of Henry IV who won on one card a hundred thousand _louis_. I found a narrow room where workmen who had but one shirt, rented a suit for the evening for twenty _sous_, police stationed at the door and starving wretches staking a crust of bread against a pistol-shot.