tube-rose, all the mystic blossoms adored by Robert de la Condamine's primitive, tortured, orgiastic saints in The Double Garden, marigolds and daisies, the most complex and the most simple flowers of all, hypocritical fuchsias, and calceolaria, sacred to la bella Cenerentola. Reaper catalogues: you know, the McCormicks and the Middle West. Porcelain catalogues: Rookwood, Royal Doulton, Wedgwood, Delft, the quaint, clean, heavy, charming Brittany ware, Majolica, the wondrous Chinese porcelains, self-colour, sang de bœuf, apple of roses, peach-blow, Sèvres, signed with the fox of Emile Renard, or the eye of Pajou, or the little house of Jean-Jacques Anteaume. Furniture catalogues: Adam and Louis XV, Futurist, Empire, Venetian and Chinese, Poincaré and Grand Rapids. Art-dealers' catalogues: Félicien Rops and Jo Davidson, Renoir and Franz Hals, Cranach and Picasso, Manet and Carpaccio. Book-dealers' catalogues: George Borrow, Thomas Love Peacock, Ambrose Bierce, William Beckford, Robert Smith Surtees, Francis William Bain. Do you know the true story of Ambrose Gwinett, related by Oliver Goldsmith: the fellow who, having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared his bed-chamber at a tavern, revived in the night, shipped at sea as a sailor, and later met on a vessel the man for whose murder he had been hung? Gwinett's supposed victim had been attacked during the night with a severe bleeding
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