Chapter 7 - Page 2

charming and awful about it.

Behind the woman, bending towards her as though whispering
in her ear, appeared a man.

Was he a man? All that could be seen of his body--legs,
arms and chest--was as hairy as the skin of an ape;
his hands and feet were crooked, like the claws of a tiger.
As to his visage, nothing more fantastic and frightful could
be imagined. Amid a thick, bristling beard, a nose like an
owl's beak and a mouth whose corners were drawn by a
wild-beast-like rictus were just discernible. The eyes
were half hidden by his thick, bushy, curly hair. Each
curl ended in a spiral, pointed and twisted like a gimlet,
and on peering at them closely it could be seen that each
of these gimlets was a little viper.

The man was smiling at the woman. It was disquieting
and sinister, the contact of these two equally chimerical
beings, the one almost an angel, the other almost a monster;
a revolting clash of the two extremes of the ideal. The
man held the pitchfork, the woman grasped the strap with
her delicate pink fingers.

As to the escutcheon itself, it was sable, that is to say,
black, and in the middle of it appeared, with the vague
whiteness of silver, a fleshless, deformed thing, which, like
the rest, at length became distinct. It was a death's head.
The nose was lacking, the orbits of the eyes were hollow
and deep, the cavity of the ear could be seen on the right
side, all the seams of the cranium could be traced, and
there only remained two teeth in the jaws.

But this black escutcheon, this livid death's head,
designed with such minuteness of detail that it seemed to
stand out from the tapestry, was less lugubrious than the
two personages who held up the hideous blazon and who
seemed to be whispering to each other in the shadow.

At the bottom of the panel in a corner was the date:
1503.