I peered through my room with a feeling of expectation which I saw nothing to justify: every article of furniture was in its proper place; the lamp, softly shaded by its globe of ground crystal, burned upon its bracket; the water-color sketches shone under their Bohemian glass; the curtains hung down languidly ; everything wore an aspect of tran¬quil slumber.

After a few moments, however, all this calm interior appeared to be¬come disturbed; the woodwork cracked stealthily; the ash-covered log suddenly emitted a jet of blue flame; and the disks of the pateras seemed like great metallic eyes, watching, like myself, for the things which were about to happen.

My eyes accidentally fell upon the desk where I had placed the foot of the Princess Hermonthis.

Galvanic battery

Instead of remaining quiet—as behooved a foot which had been em¬balmed for four thousand years—it commenced to act in a nervous manner; contracted itself, and leaped over the papers like a startled frog;—one would have imagined that it had suddenly been brought into contact with a galvanic battery: I could distinctly hear the dry sound made by its little heel, hard as the hoof of a gazelle.

I became rather discontented with my acquisition, inasmuch as I wished my paper-weights to be of a sedentary disposition, and thought it very unnatural that feet should walk about without legs; and I com¬menced to experience a feeling closely akin to fear.

Suddenly I saw the folds of my bed-curtain stir; and heard a bump¬ing sound, like that caused by some person hopping on one foot across the floor. I must confess I became alternately hot and cold; that I felt a strange wind chill my back; and that my suddenly rising hair caused my nightcap to execute a leap of several yards.

The bed-curtains opened and I beheld the strangest figure imagin¬able before me.

It was a young girl of a very deep coffee-brown complexion, like the bayadere Amani, and possessing the purest Egyptian type of perfect beauty: her eyes were almond-shaped and oblique, with eyebrows so black that they seemed blue; her nose was exquisitely chiseled, almost Greek in its delicacy of outline; and she might indeed have been taken for a Corinthian statue of bronze, but for the prominence of her cheek¬bones and the slightly African fulness of her lips, which compelled one to recognize her as belonging beyond all doubt to the hieroglyphic race which dwelt upon the banks of the Nile.

Read More about The Mummy`s Foot part 5

I went home, delighted with my acquisition.

With the idea of putting it to profitable use as soon as possible, I placed the foot of the divine Princess Hermonthis upon a heap of papers scribbled over with verses, in themselves an undecipherable mosaic work of erasures; articles freshly begun; letters forgotten, and posted in the table drawer instead of the letter-box—an error to which absent-minded people are peculiarly liable. The effect was charming, bizarre, and romantic.

Well satisfied with this embellishment, I went out with the gravity and price becoming one who feels that he has the ineffable advantage over all the passers-by whom he elbows, of possessing a piece of the Princess Hermonthis, daughter of Pharaoh.

I looked upon all who did not possess, like myself, a paper-weight so authentically Egyptian, as very ridiculous people; and it seemed to me that the proper occupation of every sensible man should consist in the mere fact of having a mummy`s foot upon his desk.

Happily I met some friends, whose presence distracted me in my in¬fatuation with this new acquisition: I went to dinner with them; for I could not very well have dined with myself.

Oriental perfume

When I came back that evening, with my brain slightly confused by a few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of Oriental perfume delicately titillated my olfactory nerves: the heat of the room had warmed the natron, bitumen, and myrrh in which the paraschistes, who cut open the bodies of the dead, had bathed the corpse of the princess;—it was a perfume at once sweet and penetrating—a perfume that four thousand years had not been able to dissipate.

The Dream of Egypt was Eternity: her odors have the solidity of granite, and endure as long.

I soon drank deeply from the black cup of sleep: for a few hours all remained opaque to me; Oblivion and Nothingness inundated me with their somber waves.

Yet light gradually dawned upon the darkness of my mind; dreams commenced to touch me softly in their silent flight.

The eyes of my soul were opened; and I beheld my chamber as it actually was; I might have believed myself awake, but for a vague con¬sciousness which assured me that I slept, and that something fantastic was about to take place.

The odor of the myrrh had augmented in intensity; and I felt a slight headache, which I very naturally attributed to several glasses of champagne that we had drunk to the unknown gods and our future fortunes.

Read More about The Accession of Alexius and Interfamily Power Struggles part 16

“Ha, ha!—you want the foot of the Princess Hermonthis,”—ex¬claimed the merchant, with a strange giggle, fixing his owlish eyes upon me—“ha, ha, ha!—for a paper-weight!—an original idea!—artistic idea! Old Pharaoh would certainly have been surprised had some one told him that the foot of his adored daughter would be used for a paper¬weight after he had had a mountain of granite hollowed out as a receptacle for the triple coffin, painted and gilded—covered with hiero-glyphics and beautiful paintings of the Judgment of Souls,”—con¬tinued the queer little merchant, half audibly, as though talking to himself!

“How much will you charge me for this mummy fragment?”

“Ah, the highest price I can get; for it is a superb piece: if I had the match of it you could not have it for less than five hundred francs; —the daughter of a Pharaoh! nothing is more rare.”

“Assuredly that is not a common article; but, still, how much do you want? In the first place let me warn you that all my wealth consists of just five louis: I can buy anything that costs five louis, but nothing dearer;—you might search my vest pockets and most secret drawers without even finding one poor—five-franc piece more.”

“Five louis for the foot of the Princess Hermonthis! that is very little, very little indeed; `tis an authentic foot,” muttered the merchant, shaking his head, and imparting a peculiar rotary motion to his eyes.

Ancient damask rag

“Well, take it, and I will give you the bandages into the bargain,” he added, wrapping the foot in an ancient damask rag—“very fine! real damask—Indian damask which has never been redyed; it is strong, and yet it is soft,” he mumbled, stroking the frayed tissue with his fingers, through the trade-acquired habit which moved him to praise even an object of so little value that he himself deemed it only worth the giving away.

He poured the gold coins into a sort of mediaeval alms-purse hanging at his belt, repeating:

“The foot of the Princess Hermonthis, to be used for a paper¬weight!”

Then turning his phosphorescent eyes upon me, he exclaimed in a voice strident as the crying of a cat which has swallowed a fish-bone:

“Old Pharaoh will not be well pleased; he loved his daughter—the dear man!”

“You speak as if you were a contemporary of his: you are old enough, goodness knows! but you do not date back to the Pyramids of Egypt,” I answered, laughingly, from the threshold.

Read More about Report of his Mission to Constantinople part 28

“No; I have quite enough weapons and instruments of carnage;—I want a small figure, something which will suit me as a paper-weight; for I cannot endure those trumpery bronzes which the stationers sell, and which may be found on everybody`s desk.”

The old gnome foraged among his ancient wares, and finally arranged before me some antique bronzes—so-called, at least; fragments of malachite; little Hindoo or Chinese idols—a kind of poussah toys in jadestone, representing the incarnations of Brahma or Vishnoo, and wonderfully appropriate to the very undivine office of holding papers and letters in place.

I was hesitating between a porcelain dragon, all constellated with warts—its mouth formidable with bristling tusks and ranges of teeth— and an abominable little Mexican fetish, representing the god Zitzili- putzili au naturel, when I caught sight of a charming foot, which I at first took for a fragment of some antique Venus.

Florentine bronze

It had those beautiful ruddy and tawny tints that lend to Florentine bronze that warm living look so much preferable to the gray-green aspect of common bronzes, which might easily be mistaken for statues in a state of putrefaction: satiny gleams played over its rounded forms, doubtless polished by the amorous kisses of twenty centuries; for it seemed a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best era of art—perhaps molded by Lysippus himself.

“That foot will be my choice,” I said to the merchant, who regarded me with an ironical and saturnine air, and held out the object desired that I might examine it more fully.

I was surprised at its lightness; it was not a foot of metal, but in sooth a foot of flesh—an embalmed foot—a mummy`s foot: on exam¬ining it still more closely the very grain of the skin, and the almost im¬perceptible lines impressed upon it by the texture of the bandages, became perceptible.

The toes were slender and delicate, and termin¬ated by perfectly formed nails, pure and transparent as agates; the great toe, slightly separated from the rest, afforded a happy contrast, in the antique style, to the position of the other toes, and lent it an aerial lightness—the grace of a bird`s foot;—the sole, scarcely streaked by a few almost imperceptible cross lines, afforded evidence that it had never touched the bare ground, and had only come in contact with the finest matting of Nile rushes, and the softest carpets of panther skin.

Read More about Report of his Mission to Constantinople part 30

Upon the denticulated shelves of several sideboards glittered im¬mense Japanese dishes with red and blue designs relieved by gilded hatching; side by side with enameled works by Bernard Palissy, rep¬resenting serpents, frogs, and lizards in relief.

From disemboweled cabinets escaped cascades of silver-lustrous Chi¬nese silks and waves of tinsel, which an oblique sunbeam shot through with luminous beads; while portraits of every era, in frames more or less tarnished, smiled through their yellow varnish.

The striped breastplate of a damascened suit of Milanese armor glit¬tered in one corner; Loves and Nymphs of porcelain; Chinese Gro¬tesques, vases of celadon and crackle-ware; Saxon and old Sevres cups encumbered the shelves and nooks of the apartment.

The dealer followed me closely through the tortuous way contrived between the piles of furniture; warding off with his hands the hazardous sweep of my coat-skirts; watching my elbows with the uneasy attention of an antiquarian and a usurer.

It was a singular face that of the merchant:— an immense skull, pol¬ished like a knee, and surrounded by a thin aureole of white hair, which brought out the clear salmon tint of his complexion all the more strikingly, lent him a false aspect of patriarchal bonhomie, counteracted, however, by the scintillation of two little yellow eyes which trembled in their orbits like two louis-d`or upon quicksilver.

Oriental or Jewish type

The curve of his nose presented an aquiline silhouette, which suggested the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands—thin, slender, full of nerves which projected like strings upon the finger-board of a violin, and armed with claws like those on the terminations of bats` wings—shook with senile trembling; but those convulsively agitated hands became firmer than steel pincers or lobsters` claws when they lifted any precious article— an onyx cup, a Venetian glass, or a dish of Bohemian crystal.

This strange old man had an aspect so thoroughly rabbinical and cabalistic that he would have been burnt on the mere testimony of his face three centuries ago.

“Will you not buy something from me to-day, sir? Here is a Malay kreese with a blade undulating like flame: look at those grooves con¬trived for the blood to run along, those teeth set backwards so as to tear out the entrails in withdrawing the weapon—it is a fine character of ferocious arm, and will look well in your collection: this two-handed sword is very beautiful—it is the work of Josepe de la Hera; and this colichemarde, with its fenestrated guard—what a superb specimen of handicraft!”

Read More about The Accession of Alexius and Interfamily Power Struggles part 19

Theophile Gautier (1811—1872)

Thophile Gautier was born at Tarbes in the south of France in 1811. He came to Paris as an infant. In 1830 he published his first volume of poems. He was, with Victor Hugo and others, one of the prominent initiators of the so-called Romantic Movement in French literature. His finest novel, Mile, de Maupin, appeared in 1835.

For many years he wrote art, dramatic, and literary criticisms, poems, stories, ballets and pantomimes, and a number of charming impres¬sionistic travel books. Gautier is one of the most accomplished poets of the external and visible world: his style is vivid, jewelled, and sensuous. His short stories are exotic, highly polished literary exercises, though some of them, like The Mummy’s Foot, are intrinsically fascinating for their plot and atmosphere.

The present version, translated by Lafcadio Hearn, is reprinted, by permission of the publisher, from the volume, One of Cleopatra`s Nights, published by Brentano`s.

The Mummy`s Foot

I had entered, in an idle mood, the shop of one of those curiosity- venders, who are called marchands de bric-a-brac in that Parisian argot which is so perfectly unintelligible elsewhere in France.

You have doubtless glanced occasionally through the windows of some of these shops, which have become so numerous now that it is fashionable to buy antiquated furniture, and that every petty stock¬broker thinks he must have his chambre au moyen age.

There is one thing there which clings alike to the shop of the dealer in old iron, the wareroom of the tapestry-maker, the laboratory of the chemist, and the studio of the painter:—in all those gloomy dens where a furtive daylight filters in through the window-shutters, the most ma¬nifestly ancient thing is dust;—the cobwebs are more authentic than the guimp laces; and the old pear-tree furniture on exhibition is actually younger than the mahogany which arrived but yesterday from America.

The warehouse of my bric-a-brac dealer was a veritable Capharnaum; all ages and all nations seemed to have made their rendezvous there; , an Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet, with ebony panels, brightly striped by lines of inlaid brass; a duchess of the court of Louis XV nonchalantly extended her fawn-like feet under a massive table of the time of Louis XIII with heavy spiral supports of oak, and carven designs of chimeras and foliage intermingled.

Read More about The Lay of the Two Lovers part 1