The Masque of the Red Death
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The story takes place at the castellated abbey of the "happy and dauntless and sagacious" Prince Prospero. Prospero and 1,000 other nobles have taken refuge in this walled abbey to escape the Red Death, a terrible plague with gruesome symptoms that has swept over the land. Victims are overcome by "sharp pains", "sudden dizziness", and "profuse bleeding at the pores", and die within half an hour. Prospero and his court are indifferent to the sufferings of the population at large; they intend to await the end of the plague in luxury and safety behind the walls of their secure refuge, having welded the doors shut.
Prospero holds a masquerade ball one night to entertain his guests in seven colored rooms of the abbey. Each of the first six rooms is decorated and illuminated in a specific color: blue, purple, green, orange, white, and violet. The last room is decorated in black and is illuminated by a scarlet light, "a deep blood color" cast from its stained glass windows. Because of this chilling pairing of colors, very few guests are brave enough to venture into the seventh room. A large ebony clock stands in this room and ominously chimes each hour, upon which everyone stops talking or dancing and the orchestra stops playing. Once the chiming stops, everyone immediately resumes the masquerade.
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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) reigned unrivaled in his mastery of mystery during his lifetime and is now widely held to be a central figure of Romanticism and gothic horror in American literature. Born in Boston, he was orphaned at age three, was expelled from West Point for gambling, and later became a well-regarded literary critic and editor. The Raven, published in 1845, made Poe famous. He died in 1849 under what remain mysterious circumstances and is buried in Baltimore, Maryland.
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The Masque of the Red Death - Edgar Allan Poe
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Title: The Masque of the Red Death
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Release Date: June 6, 2010 [EBook #1064]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH ***
Produced by Levent Kurnaz. HTML version by Al Haines.
The Masque of the Red Death
by
Edgar Allan Poe
The Red Death
had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A