The King in the Golden Mask by Marcel Schwob

And the three ladies of the night laughed at him when he staggered back for they were pouring aqua regia onto the stone from a green flask – and the stone began to bubble like quick lime. The knight of Beaufort, drawing nearer, saw that they were spinning around a slab of white rock. Masks… Disguises… Miens… False appearances… The narration is fancy, grotesque and bizarre…

They sprang from mystery and massacred in silence. They kept with them little girls whisked off from along the cemeteries, whose howls rang out in the night. …the Faulx-Visaiges slaughtered cruelly, eviscerating the women, skewering the children on pitchforks, searing the men over great spits to make them confess the hiding places of their money, painting the corpses with blood to levy the smallholdings and further reduce them with fear. The stories are the flamboyant parade of masks… Everything is in the extreme… If there is an atrocity then it’s the ultimate atrocity…

But the king’s golden mask was majestic, noble, and veritably royal. Meanwhile, the bright fabric stretched over the heads of the women mimed endlessly graceful faces enlivened by artificial smiles. Fifty merry faces blossomed to his left, and to his right fifty sad faces scowled. And the jesters’ masks gaped with laughter, while the priests’ were black with concern. In imitation of the emaciated king, the women, jesters, and priests wore unchanging faces of silver, iron, bronze, wood, and fabric. The King in the Golden Mask is a variegated suite of dark metaphors for hypocrisy, envy, greed, cruelty, stupidity, fear and dread where everything is surrounded with a sheer apocalyptic aura… To read Schwob is to encounter human history in its most scintillating form as it comes into contact with this unparalleled imagination. These writings are of such hallucinatory detail and linguistic specificity that the reader is left wondering whether they aren’t newly unearthed historical documents. Brimming with murder, suicide, royal leprosy and medieval witchcraft, Schwob’s stories portray clergymen furtively attending medieval sabbaths, Protestant galley slaves laboring under the persecution of Louis XIV and dice-tumbling sons of Florentine noblemen wandering Europe at the height of the 1374 plague. Melding the fantastic with historical fiction, these stories describe moments of unexplained violence both historical and imaginary, often blending the two through Schwob’s collaging of primary source documents into fiction. First published in French in 1892 and never before translated fully into English, The King in the Golden Mask gathers 21 of Marcel Schwob’s cruelest and most erudite tales.

The King in the Golden Mask by Marcel Schwob