Jack sensed quite a few people, but couldn't really see them because he was dazzled by all of the light: giant torchières like bonfires on pikes, and lanterns strung on colored ropes, and the light of thousands of lanterns and tapers blasting out through the twenty-foot-high windows that constituted most of the front wall of a large noble House directly in front of him. A hundred sperm whales must have given up their bodily fluids to light the lanterns. And as for the tapers in those chandeliers, why, even over the smells of cuisine, fashionable perfume, wood-smoke, and horse-manure, Jack's nose could detect the fragrance of honey-scented Mauritanian beeswax. All of this sweet-smelling radiance glanced wetly off a large fountain planted in the middle of the court: various Neptunes and Naiads and sea monsters and dolphins cleverly enwrithed to form a support for a naval frigate all speckled with fleurs-de-lis. Wreckage of Dutch and English ships washed up on shores all around, forming benches for French people to put their buttocks on.