That done, he
grasped the torch. His eyes, as he raised it, wandered dreamily over
the array of his treasures, and the forms of his dead or insensible
fellow-patricians around him, to be consumed by his act in annihilating
fire. The sensation of his solemn night-solitude in his fated palace
began to work in vivid and varying impressions on his mind, which was
partially recovering some portion of its wonted acuteness, under the
bodily reaction now produced in him by the very extravagance of the
night's excess. His memory began to retrace confusedly the scenes with
which the dwelling that he was about to destroy had been connected at
distant or at recent periods. At one moment the pomp of former
banquets, the jovial congregation of guests since departed or dead,
revived before him; at another, he seemed to be acting over again his
secret departure from his dwelling on the night before his last feast,
his stealthy return with the corpse that he had dragged from the street,
his toil in setting it up in mockery behind the black curtain, and
inventing the dialogue to be spoken before it by the hunchback.
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