"The Mask" - is a fascinating short story by the world famous French writer Guy de Maupassant (French: Guy de Maupassant, 1850 - 1893). There is a grandiose fancy-dress ball in Paris. The lively actors in masks are dancing on the stage. All of a sudden one of them falls, strikes his head and loses conscience. When his mask is taken away, under it they find not a young dancer, as everyone used to think, but an unfamiliar prostrate old man.