nd a few appeared
embossed with wounds, covered with black mercurial hog lard, with
green unguents of belladonna smeared with grains of dust and the
yellow micas of iodoforme.

Collected in his home, these flowers seemed to Des Esseintes more
monstrous than when he had beheld them, confused with others among the
glass rooms of the conservatory.

"_Sapristi!_" he exclaimed enthusiastically.

A new plant, modelled like the Caladiums, the _Alocasia Metallica_,
excited him even more. It was coated with a layer of bronze green on
which glanced silver reflections. It was the masterpiece of
artificiality. It could be called a piece of stove pipe, cut by a
chimney-maker into the form of a pike head.

The men next brought clusters of leaves, lozenge-like in shape and
bottle-green in color. In the center rose a rod at whose end a
varnished ace of hearts swayed. As though meaning to defy all
conceivable forms of plants, a fleshy stalk climbed through the heart
of this intense vermilion ace--a stalk that in some specimens was
straight, in others showed ringlets like a pig's tail.

It was the _Anthurium_, an aroid recently imported into France from
Columbia; a variety of that family to which also belonged an
_Amorphophallus_, a Cochin China plant with leaves shaped like
fish-knives, with long dark stems seamed with gashes, like lambs
flecked with black.

Des Esseintes exulted.

They brought a new batch of monstrosities from the wagon:
_Echinopses_, issuing from padded compresses with rose-colored flowers
that looked like the pitiful stumps; gaping _Nidularia_ revealing
skinless foundations in steel plates; _Tillandsia Lindeni_, the color
of wine must, with jagged scrapers; _Cypripedia_, with complicated
contours, a crazy piece of work seemingly designed by a crazy
inventor. They looked like sabots or like a lady's work-table on which
lies a human tongue with taut filaments, such as one sees designed on
the illustrated pages of works treating of the diseases of the throat
and mouth; two little side-pieces, of a red jujube color, which
appeared to have been borrowed from a child's toy mill completed this
singular collection of a tongue's underside with the color of slate
and wine lees, and of a glossy pocket from whose lining oozed a
viscous glue.

He could not remove his eyes from this unnatural orchid which had been
brought from India. Then the gardeners, impatient at his
procrastinations, themselves began to read the la