on gave me the right to go into the pretty workshop
where she made her flowers, a retreat full of books and curiosities, as
smart as a boudoir where elegance emphasized the vulgarity of the tools
of her trade. The Countess had in the course of time poetized, as I may
say, a thing which is at the antipodes to poetry--a manufacture.

"Perhaps of all the work a woman can do, the making of artificial
flowers is that of which the details allow her to display most grace.
For coloring prints she must sit bent over a table and devote herself,
with some attention, to this half painting. Embroidering tapestry, as
diligently as a woman must who is to earn her living by it, entails
consumption or curvature of the spine. Engraving music is one of the
most laborious, by the care, the minute exactitude, and the intelligence
it demands. Sewing and white embroidery do not earn thirty sous a day.
But the making of flowers and light articles of wear necessitates a
variety of movements, gestures, ideas even, which do not take a pretty
woman out of her sphere; she is still herself; she may chat, laugh,
sing, or think.

"There was certainly a feeling for art in the way in which the Countess
arranged on a long deal table the myriad-colored petals which were used
in composing the flowers she was to produce. The saucers of color were
of white china, and always clean, arranged in such order that the eye
could at once see the required shade in the scale of tints. Thus the
aristocratic artist saved time. A pretty little cabinet with a hundred
tiny drawers, of ebony inlaid with ivory, contained the little steel
moulds in which she shaped the leaves and some forms of petals. A fine
Japanese bowl held the paste, which was never allowed to turn sour, and
it had a fitted cover with a hinge so easy that she could lift it with
a finger-tip. The wire, of iron and brass, lurked in a little drawer of
the table before her.

"Under her eyes, in a Venetian glass, shaped like a flower-cup on its
stem, was the living model she strove to imitate. She had a passion for
achievement; she attempted the most difficult things, close racemes,
the tiniest corollas, heaths, nectaries of the most variegated hues. Her
hands, as swift as her thoughts, went from the table to the flower she
was making, as those of an accomplished pianist fly over the keys. Her
fingers seemed to be fairies, to use Perrault's expression, so infinite
were the different actions of twisting, fitt