Poe, Edgar Allen / 2008-07-31 00:00:00

1850
THE OVAL PORTRAIT
by Edgar Allan Poe
THE CHATEAU into which my valet had ventured to make forcible
entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded
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
the Appennines, 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 and least
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 bedecked with 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 my incipient
delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade
Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room- since it was already
night- to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the
head of my bed- and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of
black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done
that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to
the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume
which had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise
and describe them.
Read more


Parts: 1