The classical figures, the landscapes
full of atmosphere and of delicacy had vanished. And from their places
leered down jockeys and street-women painted by Jan Van Beers and D?gas,
Chaplin and Gustav Courbet, while above the mantelpiece, where once had
hung "The Merciful Knight," a Cocotte by Leibl smoked a pipe into the
room. It seemed incredible that Valentine could be at rest in such a
livid chamber, and not even the vague communications of Cuckoo woke
in the doctor such a definite and alive sensation of discomfort as
this vision of outward change that must surely betoken an inward
transformation of the most vivid and unusual kind. And everywhere, as
a deep and monotonous bell ringing relentlessly through a symphony of
discordant and crying passions, there sounded that sinister note of deep
and dusty red. Despite his own complete health of mind, and the frantic
disquisitions of the morbid Nordau, the little doctor felt as if he heard
the colour, as if it spoke from beneath his very feet, as if it sang
under his fingers when he laid them on the brocade of a couch, as if the
room palpitated with a heavy music which murmured drowsily in his ears
a monotonous song of dull and weary change. No silence had ever before
spoken to him so powerfully.
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