A small hall which had a few months before been a common wine shop had been transformed into a lugubrious place. The walls were painted a dead black, and were hung with a large number of paintings--scenes from masked balls, gondola parades, serenades with a balcony scene, some of the lovers' rendezvous of Venice and an ideal view of Granada, with couples gazing at each other and sighing in the gondolas on the lagoons, or in the Andalusian courts--and in this strange place with its romantic pictures, souvenirs of Musset or of Carlo Gozzi, the tables were made in the form of coffins with lighted candles standing upon them, and the waiters were dressed as undertakers' assistants, with shiny black hats trimmed with crape, on their heads. "What poison will you drink before you die?" asked one of the creatures of Bernardet. Bernardet sat and gazed about him. A few "high-flyers" from the other side of Paris were there. Here and there a thief from that quarter sat alone at a table. Some elegants in white cravats, who had come there in correct evening dress, were going later, after the opera, to sup with some première. The police officer understood very well why the blasé came there. They wished to jog their jaded appetites; they sought to find some _piment_, a curry, spice to season the tameness of their daily existence. The coffin-shaped tables upon which they leaned their elbows amused them. Several of them had asked for a _bavaroise_, as they were on milk diet. They pointed out to each other the gas flaming from the jets fashioned in the form of a broken shin-bone. "A little patience, my friends," said a sort of manager, who was dressed in deep mourning. "Before long we will adjourn to the Cave of Death!" The drinkers in white cravats shouted. Bernardet experienced, on the contrary, what Mme. Bernardet would have called a "creepy" sensation. Seasoned as he was to the bloody and villainous aspect of crime, he felt the instinctive shrinking of a healthy and level-headed bourgeois against these drolleries of the brain-diseased upper class and the pleasantries of the blasé decadents. At a certain moment, and after an explanation given by the manager, the gas was turned off, and the lovers in the gondolas, the guitar players, the singers of Spanish songs, the dancers infatuated with the Moulin Rouge, changed suddenly in sinister fashion. In place of the blond heads and rosy cheeks, skulls appeared; the smiles became grins which showed the teeth in their fleshless gums. The bodies, clothed in doublets, in velvets and satins, a moment ago, were made by some interior illumination to change into hideous skeletons. In his mocking tones the manager explained and commented on the metamorphosis, adding to the funeral spectacle the pleasantry of a buffoon. "See! diseased Parisians, what you will be on Sunday!"