A short story for a Saturday night, "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe.
It starts: "The 'Red Death' had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal . . . ."
Prince Prospero, "when his dominions were half depopulated, 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 . . . ."
"It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained
his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence."
In the end, the revellers "acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night.
And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall."
"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
Donald Trump has managed to bring to life the short story.
(Suggested by a Tweet by Laurence Tribe. @tribelaw)
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