whose sea blue is choked, opaque, sulphurous, as though yellowed by
bile.

This done, he could now set the petals of his flowers with transparent
stones which had morbid and vitreous sparks, feverish and sharp
lights.

He composed them entirely with Ceylon snap-dragons, cymophanes and
blue chalcedony.

These three stones darted mysterious and perverse scintillations,
painfully torn from the frozen depths of their troubled waters.

The snap-dragon of a greenish grey, streaked with concentric veins
which seem to stir and change constantly, according to the
dispositions of light.

The cymophane, whose azure waves float over the milky tint swimming in
its depths.

The blue chalcedony which kindles with bluish phosphorescent fires
against a dead brown, chocolate background.

The lapidary made a note of the places where the stones were to be
inlaid. "And the border of the shell?" he asked Des Esseintes.

At first he had thought of some opals and hydrophanes; but these
stones, interesting for their hesitating colors, for the evasions of
their flames, are too refractory and faithless; the opal has a quite
rheumatic sensitiveness; the play of its rays alters according to the