The ballroom was all golden; smoothed on cornices, stippled on
door-frames, damascened pale, almost silvery, over darker gold on
door panels and on the shutters which covered and annulled the
windows, conferring on the room the look of some superb jewelcase
shut off from an unworthy world. It was not the flashy gilding
which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the
hair of certain Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under
a muted use of precious metal intended to let beauty be seen and
cost forgotten. Here and there on the panels were knots of rococo
flowers in a colour so faint as to seem just an ephemeral pink
reflected from the chandeliers.

That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made
Don Fabrizio’s heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway:
this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things;
the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields
around Donnafugata, rapt, begging for pity from the tyrannous sun;
in this room, too, as on his estates in mid-August, the harvest had
been gathered long ago and stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here now,
a sole reminder in the colour of burnt up useless stubble. The notes
of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylisation of
the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on those parched
surfaces, to-day, yesterday, to-morrow, for ever and for ever.
The crowd of dancers among whom he could count so many near
to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made of the
raw material of lapsed memories, more labile even than that of
disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded
couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky.