Villon's reflections were fluttered by a sudden blare of music, and a gaudy fellow in a pursuivant's coat made his appearance on the top of the terrace and rattled blast after blast from his brazen trumpet. In obedience to the long-looked-for signal, a many-coloured crowd of revellers gushed from the palace and flowed like a glowing wave of merry-making down the steps and into the walks and alleys of the rose garden. All the strange figures that a freakish fancy could suggest leaped and danced and shouted in a rapture of mirth-satyrs and follies, clowns and devils wheeled wildly by, waving torches, clashing cymbals, or screaming at the top of their voices, while sedater spirits, masked and muffled in mantles of sombre hue, moved through the tumultuous throng and found their abated pleasure in mystification and intrigues.
Villon had a mask in his girdle. He put it on and pushing into the press allowed himself to drift hither and thither with the eddying currents of pleasure. His fantastic imagination took fire from the strange shapes and sounds about him. The sense of being in a dream, which had never deserted him from the first moment of his awakened consciousness in the rose garden, clung closely about him on this night, and the jocund figures around him flitted by as unreal as the phantoms of a noon-tide sleep.
