His little Mongolian eyes
blink through his amusing aplomb. Here are gilded pillars and marbled
walls, great rugs and marvelous furniture. Here music is playing somewhere
and people are eating off gold-edged dishes.
* * * * *
And now you will smile at me, not him. Because watching him of evenings,
on and off, a curious notion takes hold of my thoughts. I have noticed the
race oddities of his face, the Mongolian eyes, the Slavic cheek bones, the
Italian hair. A mixed breed, this little fop. Mixed through a dozen
centuries. Fathers and mothers that came from a hundred parts of the
earth. But down the centuries they had one thing in common. Servitude. The
Carlovingian courts, the courts of the De Medici, the Valois, and long
before that, the great houses that lay around the Roman hills. Dragged
from their villages, east, west, north and south, they flitted in the
trappings of servitude through the vast halls of tyrants, barons, Caesars,
sybarites, debauchees. They were the torchbearers, the caitiffs, the
varlets, the bathkeepers, the inanimate figures whose faces watched from
the shadows the great orgies of Tiberius, the bacchanals of satraps,
kings, captains and squires.
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