as many minutes, multiplications of that sinister old man! Let him who may be laughing at my perplexities - no fraternal sharing of sympathetic shudders - let him consider this - despite their decrepitude those seven hideous monsters had eternal airs! Might I have beheld the eighth without dropping dead - inexorable double, ironically fated, disgusting Phoenix, son and father of himself? But I turned my back on that cortège from Hades... Exasperated as a drunk

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who's seeing double, I went home, and locked my door, and horror-stricken, sick and frozen to the bone, my mind fevered and distraught by this mystery and absurdity was damned! In vain my reason tried to take the tiller, but a tempest raged, and mocked it. My soul was dancing, dancing like a battered hulk, an old wreck sinking, unmasted, in a monstrous and a boundless ocean waste! next French