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Updated: May 26, 2025
The morning sunlight, goldenly gay, was streaming in through the windows as Magda, wrapped in a soft silken peignoir, made her way into the bathroom. Virginie, her eyes reddened from a night's weeping, was kneeling beside the sunken bath of green-veined marble, stirring sweet-smelling salts in to the steaming water. Their fragrance permeated the atmosphere like incense.
The cipolline columns carrying the round arches on their square capitals are lustreless, and their green-veined marble looks like long-buried wood. The mosaic pavement stretches its discs and volutes of porphyry and serpentine or yellowed Parian marble, a tarnished and uneven carpet, to the greenish-white marble steps of the chancel.
But probably concurrently with this has grown up the production of perfume by the scales on the wings of moths and butterflies perfumes which have the most powerful attraction for the opposite sex of the same species. That of the green-veined white is described as resembling the agreeable odour of the lemon verbena.
I turn my horse's head to the red wall of fir-stems, and leap over the furze-grown bank into my cathedral, wherein if there be no saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no idols; but endless vistas of smooth red green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark roof, lessening away into endless gloom, paved with rich brown fir-needle a carpet at which Nature has been at work for forty years.
An array of marvels attracted attention. Behind the altar the sacred vessels in gold, of antique form, the crown in diamonds surmounted by the famous stone, the "Regent," the other attributes of royalty on a cushion of velvet embroidered with fleurs-de-lis; on the front of the altar the royal mantle, open, not less than twenty-four feet in length; on the altar of green-veined marble, superb candelabra in gold; on the centre of the cross of the church, suspended from the ceiling above the choir and the prie-dieu of the King, an immense canopy of crimson velvet, sown with golden fleurs-de-lis; at the back of the choir, toward the nave, about one hundred and fifty feet from the portal, the gigantic jube with its staircase of thirty steps; upon this the throne; all around a swarm of standards, those of the five companies of the King's body-guard, and the flag of his foot-guards, borne by the superior officers; on the two sides of the stairway, ranged en Echelon, the flags and standards of the regiments of the guard and of the line in camp under the walls of Rheims; a splendor of light, banishing all regret for the sun, from candelabra at the entrance of the choir, from chandeliers in the galleries, from chandeliers full of candles suspended from the ceiling, from tapers on the columns.
She gave him no time to blush and hesitate over the impropriety of entering a lady's room at midnight, but stalked ahead with a brief "Come in." She opened a large portfolio covered with green-veined black paper and yanked out a dozen unframed pastels and wash-drawings which she scornfully tossed on the bed, saying, as she pointed to a mass of Marseilles roofs: "Do you see this sketch?
As she stepped up from its green-veined depths, she caught a glimpse of herself in a panel mirror hung against the wall, and for a moment she was aware of the familiar thrill of delight in her own beauty in the gleaming, glowing radiance of perfectly formed, perfectly groomed flesh and blood.
Immediately opposite, on an embossed ivory stand, and protected from air and dust by a glass case, were two antique goblets, one of green-veined agate, one of blood-red onyx; and into the coating of wax, spread along the ivory slab, were inserted amphorae, one dry and empty, the other a third full of Falerian, whose topaz drops had grown strangely mellow and golden in the ashy cellars of Herculaneum, and had doubtless been destined for some luxurious triclinium in the days of Titus.
A long transparent amber shallow, dimpled with fleeting silver rings by rising trout; a low cascade of green-veined snow; a deep dark pool of swirling orange-brown, walled in with heathery rocks, and paved with sandstone slabs and boulders, distorted by the changing refractions of the eddies, sight delicious to the angler.
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