Why does Prince Prospero hide in his palace?

In Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 short story Masque of the Red Death, character Prospero hides away in his palace as an attempt to escape the plague that besieges his kingdom.
Poe goes into great detail about Prince Prospero’s palace, describing each of the seven rooms in great detail with their lavish fixtures, dancing light and vivid color. But no matter how beautiful these rooms are or how spectacular the masquerade seems, it is all an outright denial of the actual horror taking place just outside.
Because of Poe’s notorious use of symbolism, it can be speculated that these rooms represent the human psyche, each signifying an area of consciousness, memory or thought. In that, the black room would symbolize more extreme or negative areas of the mind. The palace’s rooms could also be interpreted as stages of life – the black room embodying every person’s last. This theory would be more appropriate if one wanted to analyze Prince Prospero’s actions further. This fact can be dually representative of Poe’s personal rejection of transcendentalism.
In the simplest terms, Prince Prospero hid in his palace because he wanted to escape death. However, no amount of status or beauty can prevent this inevitability.

Prince Prospero shuts himself away in his fortresslike abbey to escape the terrible plague that is raging outside. During the fourteenth century, when the story is set, a horrible disease called the Black Death spread like wildfire across Europe. The bubonic plague, as it is also called, killed about 60% of Europe's population. Medical knowledge was pretty basic in those days, so no one had any idea of how the plague had started or what could be done to stop it. As a consequence, about 25 million people died a horrible, lingering death.
The Black Death, like the Red Death that stalks Prospero's princedom, did not respect class status or wealth and counted numerous members of Europe's leading aristocratic families among its victims. Prince Prospero is determined not to be one of them. If anything, the Red Death is even more deadly than its black counterpart. Around half of Prospero's subjects have died as a result of the plague, and he is desperate not to join them. He thinks that by locking himself and his upper-class guests behind the castellated abbey walls he will be safe from the ravages of the Red Death. He also thinks that the Red Death is a great opportunity for everyone to have fun and enjoy themselves; it will take their minds off the misery, death, and suffering outside the abbey walls.