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Updated: May 20, 2025
At the end of the mirror were pairs of silver candelabra bearing shaded wax lights and oval cushions of white camelias set with roses and orchids. At the extreme ends were round pieces of bon silene roses and lilies of the valley. Around this elaborate centre decoration were ranged crystal compotes and cut-glass decanters.
Palms of all varieties, orchids, tree-ferns, bamboos, bananas, mangoes, gradually give way to slender pines; the heavy odors of the tropics are replaced by a pleasant balsamic fragrance; the hillsides become clothed with familiar flowers daisies, buttercups, heliotrope, roses, fuchsias, geraniums, cannas, camelias, Easter lilies, azaleas, morning glories, until the mountain-slopes look like a vast old-fashioned garden.
Anfisa Alexeyevna's birthday came off just then, too, and there were two balls arranged. At that time Dumas-fils' beautiful work, La Dame aux Camelias a novel which I consider imperishable had just come into fashion. In the provinces all the ladies were in raptures over it, those who had read it, at least. Camellias were all the fashion.
"You see, all common flowers fade and die in time," he explained, "and so there are seasons when the pretty blooms are scarce. Therefore I decided to make one tin flower bed all of tin flowers, and my workmen have created them with rare skill. Here you see tin camelias, tin marigolds, tin carnations, tin poppies and tin hollyhocks growing as naturally as if they were real."
"I will try it for the last time." Attired in a dress-coat, he arrived in the theatre where the eternal "Dame aux Camelias" was being played. A French actress was showing in a novel way how consumptive women die. Nekhludoff was shown to the box occupied by Mariette. In the corridor a liveried servant bowed and opened the door for him.
At every turn in the streets baskets-full of mammole, the sweet-scented Parma violet, are offered you by little girls and boys; and at the corner of the Condotti and Corso is a splendid show of camelias, set into beds of double violets, and sold for a song.
She seems to speak her words, her lines, with a kind of joyful satisfaction; all the artist in her delights in the task. Her nerves are in it, as well as her intelligence; but everything is coloured by the poetry, everything is subordinate to beauty. Well, and she seems still to be the same Phèdre that she was eleven or twelve years ago, as she is the same "Dame aux Camélias."
We played La Dame aux Camelias in America Camille, why, no one was ever able to tell me. This play, which the public rushed to see in crowds, shocked the over-strained Puritanism of the small American towns. The critics of the large cities discussed this modern Magdalene. But those of the small towns began by throwing stones at her.
Children from the suburban cottages ran alongside the moving car, merrily casting roses, heliotropes, geraniums, and camelias through the open windows into our laps, and the tourists, pleased with the floral offerings, in return tossed pennies to the running children.
I made a lovely white cross for the super-altar with camelias and azaleas and white geraniums, but after all it was not really as spring-like, as suitable for a "Resurrection", as the simple sweet wild flowers, still dewy from their nests in field and glade and lane. That Easter was memorable to me for another cause. It saw waked and smothered my first doubt.
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