eous with the weariness he began to feel in the presence of
popular ideas, his love for flowers had grown purged of all impurities
and lees, and had become clarified.

He compared a florist's shop to a microcosm wherein all the categories
of society are represented. Here are poor common flowers, the kind
found in hovels, which are truly at home only when resting on ledges
of garret windows, their roots thrust into milk bottles and old pans,
like the gilly-flower for example.

And one also finds stupid and pretentious flowers like the rose which
belongs in the porcelain flowerpots painted by young girls.

Then, there are flowers of noble lineage like the orchid, so delicate
and charming, at once cold and palpitating, exotic flowers exiled in
the heated glass palaces of Paris, princesses of the vegetable kingdom
living in solitude, having absolutely nothing in common with the
street plants and other bourgeois flora.

He permitted himself to feel a certain interest and pity only for the
popular flowers enfeebled by their nearness to the odors of sinks and
drains in the poor quarters. In revenge he detested the bouquets
harmonizing with the cream and gold rooms of pretentious houses. For
the joy of his eyes he reserved those distinguished, rare blooms which
had been brought from distant lands and whose lives were sustained by
artful devices under artificial equators.

But this very choice, this predilection for the conservatory plants
had itself changed under the influence of his mode of thought.
Formerly, during his Parisian days, his love for artificiality had led
him to abandon real flowers and to use in their place replicas
faithfully executed by means of the miracles performed with India
rubber and wire, calico and taffeta, paper and silk. He was the
possessor of a marvelous collection of tropical plants, the result of
the labors of skilful artists who knew how to follow nature and
recreate her step by step, taking the flower as a bud, leading it to
its full development, even imitating its decline, reaching such a
point of perfection as to convey every nuance--the most fugitive
expressions of the flower when it opens at dawn and closes at evening,
observing the appearance of the petals curled by the wind or rumpled
by the rain, applying dew drops of gum on its matutinal corollas;
shaping it in full bloom, when the branches bend under the burden of
their sap, or showing the dried stem and shrivelled cupules, when