wax-besprinkled

Updated: May 12, 2025

While the coffin was placed in the huge, black and white, wax-besprinkled catafalque that does duty for some three thousand dead in the course of its career so I was informed by a philosophically-minded mute whom I once consulted on a point over a couple of glasses of petit blanc while an indifferent priest mumbling the office for the dead, do you know what the friends of the departed were saying as, all dressed in black from head to foot, they sat or stood in the church?

Honoré de Balzac - The Firm of Nucingen