"The Mask" by Robert W. Chambers

1 year ago
23

This is just all the chapters put together into one upload. If you've been following along the whole time, there is nothing new to hear here.

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Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2.

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0:00:00 Chapter 1
0:10:01 Chapter 2
0:17:27 Chapter 3
0:34:23 Chapter 4

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Look at that - the book I'm reading from has footnotes for things the reader may not be familiar with. For example:

Mahl stick: A stick with a padded tip, used to support a painter's hand holding a paintbrush.

For the bit about the "Sanctus in Gounod's Mass", there is a footnote:

Charles Gounod, the French composer, wrote "St. Cecilia Mass" in 1855. The "Sanctus" is the fourth movement.

Boris Yvain is mentioned in passing in "The Repairer of Reputations", the first story in "The King in Yellow".

The bit about fossilization is also covered in Lovecraft's story "The Man of Stone".

Spinet = a small harpsichord with the strings set obliquely to the keyboard, popular in the 18th century

Jack's role in chapter 4 feels a bit ham-fisted to me. His role in prior chapters didn't feel entirely natural to begin with, and it was probably because he was inserted into the story only for this rather lame attempt at foreshadowing in chapter 4. But they can't just have him appear in chapter 4 out of nowhere, so he was forced into the story early on to be available for this use at the end of the story. Bleh.

And given how callous Boris was about turning living things to stone, it's just as well what happened to him in chapter 3 :-P

The pictures used are:

Chapter 1: a photo of a lilium longiflorum, commonly known as an Easter Lily taken by Matt H. Wade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MattWade and https://twitter.com/thatmattwade) used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en).

Chapter 2: "Lanhydrock, Cornwall (NT) - The Smoking Room" by CharmaineZoe's Marvelous Melange, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).

Chapter 3: photo "Michelangelo's Madonna and Child, Church of Our Lady, Bruges, Belgium." by Jim Linwood, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).

Chapter 4: an old pic of Constantinople.

To follow along: https://gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492-h/8492-h.htm#THE_MASK

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