All You Can Books

The Beautiful Lady

Booth Tarkington

40 ratings
The Beautiful Lady | Booth Tarkington

The Beautiful Lady

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Raffaele Ansolini is down on his luck: living in Paris is not quite so amazing if there are no funds to finance the amusement. So Ansolini has taken radical steps to support himself. Shaving off his hair, he uses his bald head as advertising space for a local theatre. This is not the costume in which to meet the most beautiful woman in Paris. Will he be able to find her again?
k sweet and fruity champagne because the good wines are already in their veins. These Parisians are born intoxicated and remain so; it is not fair play to require them to be like other human people. Their deepest feeling is for the arts; and, as everyone had declared, they are farceurs in their tragedies, tragic in their comedies. They prepare the last epigram in the tumbril; they drown themselves with enthusiasm about the alliance with Russia. In death they are witty; in war they have poetic spasms; in love they are mad.

The strangest of all this is that it is not only the Parisians who are the insane ones in Paris; the visitors are none of them in behaviour as elsewhere. You have only to go there to become as lunatic as the rest. Many travellers, when they have departed, remember the events they have caused there as a person remembers in the morning what he has said and thought in the moonlight of the night.

In Paris it is moonlight even in the morning; and in Paris one falls in love even more strangely than by moonlight.

It is a place of glimpses: a veil fluttering from a motor-car, a little lace handkerchief fallen from a victoria, a figure crossing a lighted window, a black hat vanishing in the distance of the avenues of the Tuileries. A young man writes a ballade and dreams over a bit of lace. Was I not, then, one of the least extravagant of this mad people? Men have fallen in love with photographs, those greatest of liars; was I so wild, then, to adore this grey skirt, this small shoe, this divine glove, the golden-honey voice—of all in Paris the only one to pity and to understand? Even to love the mystery of that lady and to build my dreams upon it?—to love all the more because of the mystery? Mystery is the last word and the completing charm to a young man's passion. Few sonnets have been written to wives whose matrimony is more than five years of age—is it not so?

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