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  • Subject: The Oval Portrait
Subject: The Oval Portrait
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[URL="http://www.franklin-et-marshall.org/ "]Franklin Marshall[/URL]


THE CHATEAU into which my valet had ventured to makeforcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperatelywounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one
of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among theAppennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had
been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest andleast sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building.
Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedeckedwith manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great
number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings,which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many
nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary- in these paintings myincipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close theheavy shutters of the room- since it was already night- to light the tongues of a tall candelabrumwhich stood by the head of my bed- and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of blackvelvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not tosleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volumewhich had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and describe them.

  • 06.28.2011 3:13 AM PDT