med and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the
story of their shame, but he was unchanged. No winter marred his face
or stained his flowerlike bloom. How different it was with material
things! Where had they passed to? Where was the great crocus-coloured
robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked
by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena? Where the huge velarium
that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, that Titan sail
of purple on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a
chariot drawn by white, gilt-reined steeds? He longed to see the
curious table-napkins wrought for the Priest of the Sun, on which were
displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast;
the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden
bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of
Pontus and were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests,
rocks, hunters--all, in fact, that a painter can copy from nature"; and
the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which
were embroidered the verses of a song beginning "Madame, je suis tout
joyeux," the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold
thread, and each note, of square shape in those days, formed with four
pearls. He read of the room that was prepared at the palace at Rheims
for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy and was decorated with "thirteen
hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the
king's arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings
were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked
in gold." Catherine de Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her of
black velvet powdered with crescents and suns. Its curtains were of
damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold and silver
ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls, and it
stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's devices in cut black
velvet upon cloth of silver. Louis XIV had gold embroidered caryatides
fifteen feet high in his apartment. The state bed of Sobieski, King of
Poland, was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with
verses from the Koran. Its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully
chased, and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions. It
had been taken from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of
Mohammed had stoo