The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example in blue-and vividly blue were its windows. These windows were of stained glass whose colour varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect.

The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. Here the case was very different, as might have been expected from the duke’s love of the bizarre. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The external world could take care of itself. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.īut the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. Blood was its Avatar and its seal-the redness and the horror of blood.

No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. The “Red Death” had long devastated the country.

The masque of the red death short story