Marcel moved across the cold floor, his claws sliding and making tiny screeching sounds that made him jump. Occasionally he even fled the sound of his own passing, so that his trajectory across the room was a ragged zigzig, stopping at an antique baler to cower or against a cotton gin display to catch breath.

He didn’t know where to go. Out of this room, at very least — his father would surely find him and chivy him out, should he settle so close. He scuttled to the next doorway and peered into the gloom. Nothing but pictures; the nearest blazed with gaudy, overblown flowers that drooped over a staring, bloody rabbit. Marcel sniffed nervously, and started out into the room. He was halfway across, with a doorway ahead and one on his right, when he made the mistake of glancing up at the wall again.

There, curled into a ball but with eyes lazily trained, was a cat. A horrible, silky cat, with eyes as yellow as harvest moons and ivory teeth glinting suggestively from its dark mouth. Marcel’s heart took a running start, circled his head, took brief refuge in his ears, and then took off again. Finding nowhere safe anywhere in his quivering body, it leapt off to the right, carrying the frantic mouse with it.

He bounded through the doorway, past a motley collection of harps and mandolins, through another doorway, past a suit of armor…he received only impressions, flashes of each room through which he dashed, and the impressions he received did little to calm his racing heart and paws. Ahead, darkness loomed, and before he could stop, he had bowled into a low platform, perhaps four inches off the marble, covered with plushy carpet. He rolled off to the side and sat up, shaking the stars away.

He was in a room whose walls were dark with highboys and sideboards, china cabinets, wardrobes and grandfather clocks. Musty wood scent was on the air. The platform which had stopped his career rose at the center of the room, and from it rose a bed.

Its posts were dark, ruddy things, encrusted with carved oak leaves and acorns, and between them dark thick folds of burgundy velvet hung. Entranced, Marcel pulled himself up onto the platform and tiptoed up to the bed, smelling the reassuring woodiness and dust. This was a good home for a mouse, he decided, and began to slowly scale the bedpost, curling his little claws over the ornate protuberances and slithering up the edge of leaves. Following the curve of a branch, he passed behind the sheltering curtain and onto the rolling expanses of faded velvet blanket. He toiled across the bed, which gave so much under his tiny feet that he reeled and fell like Maxime on Bastille Day.

He put down his food-tin and curled into the space between the two luxurious pillows, smelling the smell of old down that still clung in the most remote parts of the dovecot. How relaxed he felt! How opulent his new home had proved! He drowsily closed his eyes, whispering, “Won’t mother be surprised when she finds out how aristocratic I am?”

No sooner had the little pink lid closed over the dark drop of an eye than it flicked open again. Aristocratic? He looked around. Perhaps his father had declared him a failure, a mouse without principles, but did he really mean to jump so fully into apostasy? He shivered, and suddenly the plush velvet did not seem so warm. Aristocratic. This did seem like an aristocrat’s bed. And of course an aristocrat’s bed would be in a museum, because as his father had taught them at great length, every aristocrat had been killed during the Revolution. Marcel was not sure why they were still a menace if this was the case, but the language had been quite unequivocal.

So…he was sleeping in an aristocrat’s bed…in a dead person’s bed! He jumped away from the pillows, quivering, and into a beam of moonlight that fell through a moth-hole in the canopy, like a pale cold finger touching his terrified back. The curtains gusted in a breath from somewhere, and their dark, shifting pile, moving like a man might in his sleep, seemed no longer seemed a comfort that kept the world at bay, but a wall that kept poor Marcel within!

The little mouse closed his eyes, then opened them, then opened one and closed one. No use! His new home had been transformed by a moment’s thought. The burgundy was the color of blood, the velvet was the wages of oppression, and even the carving on the dark wood seemed part of a sepulchral inscription.

With a petrified squeak, Marcel threw his food-tin ahead of him and dove at the nearest curtain. It embraced him, choked him, checked him, wound itself around his struggling form, and finally let him fall, scrabbling and fighting and scared out of his wits, back on the low platform in the furniture room, staring out at the rooms that must, somewhere, contain a home.