Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve her at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine,—­the son of the Fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of Innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a [77] Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta, and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d’Este in a cup of emerald, and in honor of a shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles VI., who had so wildly adored his brother’s wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who could only be soothed by Saracen cards painted with the images of Love and Death and Madness; and, in his trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthus-like curls, Grifonetto Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his page, and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him.

There was a horrible fascination in them all.  He saw them at night, and they troubled his imagination in the day.  The Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning,—­poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain.  Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.  There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

CHAPTER X

[...77] It was on the 7th of November, the eve of his own thirty-second birthday, as he often remembered afterwards.

He was walking home about eleven o’clock from Lord Henry’s, where he had been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was cold and foggy.  At the corner of Grosvenor Square and South Audley Street a man passed him in the mist, walking very fast, and with the collar of his gray ulster turned up.  He had a bag in his hand.  He recognized him.  It was Basil Hallward.  A strange sense of fear, for which he could not account, came over him.  He made no sign of recognition, and went on slowly, in the direction of his own house.

But Hallward had seen him.  Dorian heard him first stopping, and then hurrying after him.  In a few moments his hand was on his arm.

“Dorian!  What an extraordinary piece of luck!  I have been waiting for you ever since nine o’clock in your library.  Finally I took pity on your tired servant, and told him to go to bed, as he let me out.  I am off to Paris by the midnight train, and I wanted particularly to see you before I left.  I thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as you passed me.  But I wasn’t quite sure.  Didn’t you recognize me?”