Potiphar's ball.
Is this account of the matter, or _Vanity Fair_, the satire? What are
the prospects of any society of which that tale is the true history?
There is a picture in the Luxembourg gallery at Paris, _The Decadence of
the Romans_, which made the fame and fortune of Couture, the painter. It
represents an orgie in the court of a temple, during the last days of
Rome. A swarm of revellers occupy the middle of the picture, wreathed in
elaborate intricacy of luxurious posture, men and women intermingled;
their faces, in which the old Roman fire scarcely flickers, brutalized
with excess of every kind; their heads of dishevelled hair bound with
coronals of leaves, while, from goblets of an antique grace, they drain
the fiery torrent which is destroying them. Around the bacchanalian
feast stand, lofty upon pedestals, the statues of old Rome, looking,
with marble calmness and the severity of a rebuke beyond words, upon the
revellers. A youth of boyish grace, with a wreath woven in his tangled
hair, and with red and drowsy eyes, sits listless upon one pedestal,
while upon another stands a boy insane with drunkenness, and proffering
a dripping goblet to the marble mouth of the statue.
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