Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man‘s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. - P126
One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. Yours seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity. You have filled them with a madness for pleasure. They have gone down into the depths. You led them there. - P128
The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he had been lost in some delightful dream. Yet he had not dreamed at all. His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain. But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms. - P136
Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent, blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came back to him, and he grew cold with passion. The dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day. - P137
Sur une gamme chromatique,
Le sein de perles ruisselant,
La Vénus de l‘Adriatique
Sort de l‘eau son corps rose et blanc.
Les dômes, sur l‘azur des ondes
Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
S‘enflent comme des gorges rondes
Que soulève un soupir d‘amour.
L‘esquif aborde et me dépose,
Jetant son amarre au pilier,
Devant une façade rose,
Sur le marbre d‘un escalier. - P138
Gautier‘s ‘Emaux et Camées,‘ a Charpentier‘s Japanese-paper edition: the Japanese paper edition (‘papier vergé‘) of Théophile Gautier‘s Émaux et Camées with the etching (‘eau-forte‘) by J. Jacquemart, was published in Paris by Charpentier in 1872.
the poem about the hand of Lacenaire: ‘Lacenaire‘, in Gautier‘s Émaux et Camées. Pierre François Lacenaire (1803-36) was a convicted double murderer.
‘du supplice encore mal lavée‘... ‘doigts de faune‘: ‘of torment yet uncleansed‘... ‘fingers like those of a faun‘ (‘Lacenaire‘, Émaux et Camées, 191).
Sur une gamme chromatique... escalier: from Gautier‘s ‘Sur les lagunes‘(‘On the Lagoons‘, Émaux et camées, 25).
Upon a chromatic scale,
Her bosom streaming with pearls,
The Venus of the Adriatic
Comes out of the water in her pink and white flesh.
The domes upon the bluewater‘s waves
Pursue the pure contour of the musical phrase,
Filling like plump breasts
That heave with a sigh of love.
The skiff lands and sets me down,
Throwing its lines on the pillar,
In front of a pink façade,
On the marble of a stairway.
the Lido: the nineteenth-century seaside resort built on the largest sand-bank surrounding the lagoon in which the city of Venice is located.
Campanile: the 324-foot high bell-tower of St Mark‘s basilica in the Piazza San Marco, Venice. - P222
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