A sense of passing through a fantastic dream-world began to steal upon me as I wandered through the Hall of the Zodiac with its great blue roof of stars and celestial signs and ships drawn by dogs, and its walls gay with figures in green and gold, and came to a bed with tall green curtains, in which the inevitable Napoleon had once slept. He was not, I mused, of those who could not sleep in a new bed. Followed a suite of three rooms of the Emperor, decorated with painted tapestry, the real removed to Vienna.
And the nightmare continued—one long succession of cold stone floors below and crystal chandeliers on high, bleakly glittering. There was a Hall of the Popes, bare as a barrack. There was a long shiny gallery of bad pictures, which was once a shrine of the Masters. There was a Ducal Apartment modernised, but with the old gilded and bossed ceiling, and dark cobwebbed canvases of the Flemish school. There was the Hall of the Archers, picturesque with the great wooden rafters of its ruined roof and still painted with illusive white pillars, statues, and scenes. Most monstrous of all was the many mirrored, many chandeliered Ball-room—its rows of mirrors reflecting what dead faces, its gold frieze of _putti_ still echoing what madrigals and toccatas, the gods of Olympus looking down from its frescoed ceiling, Apollo driving his chariot and four, and the Arts, the Sciences, Parnassus, Virgil, Sordello, peeping from every arch and lunette. And from the Hall of the Archers my nightmare led me through Ducal Halls and still other Ducal Halls, till I had passed through seven—vasty Halls of Death, with marvellous gilded ceilings and unplastered walls, or with plaster or whitewash over frescoes, or with a sixteenth-century ceiling swearing at an elegant Austrian bathroom (hot and cold). Vivid, even in this strange dream, stood out a ceiling intaglioed with a labyrinth of gilded wood recording the victory of Vincenzo over the Turks:
“Contra Turcos pugnavit Vincenzo Gonzaga”
—and intertangled repeatedly with the labyrinth the device which d’Annunzio has borrowed for his latest novel—_Forse che si, forse che no_—and reproduced upon the cover. An old mirror with the glass half-sooted over reflected these glories drearily and showed me the only living face in this labyrinthine tomb.