There was a coldness, it seemed to me, beyond her years, in her smiling melancholy persistent refusal to afford me the least ray of light.
Distant, enigmatic, shadowed: delicate heliotrope and pale rose petals, muted and soft, resting atop a chilly, intimate base that blends white musk, cashmere woods, and a touch of tonka bean.
We sat down on a rude bench, under a group of magnificent lime trees. The sun was setting with all its melancholy splendor behind the sylvan horizon, and the stream that flows beside our home, and passes under the steep old bridge I have mentioned, wound through many a group of noble trees, almost at our feet, reflecting in its current the fading crimson of the sky.
A scent both bright and subdued: bergamot shuddering through lime leaves, ruby-tinged amber sunlight, violet leaf, oak bark, and sandalwood smoke.
The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people, it had marvelous physical influences connected with life. Mademoiselle related that her cousin, who was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light on the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium.
“The moon, this night,” she said, “is full of idyllic and magnetic influence—and see, when you look behind you at the front of the schloss how all its windows flash and twinkle with that silvery splendor, as if unseen hands had lighted up the rooms to receive fairy guests.”
Moon-kissed petals of night-blooming florals aflame with hypnotic opium tar, fae tuberose, and a sliver of metallic aldehyde.
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