Above a neck that emerges stiffly from a ruff starched likewise, it is a beardless cold-creamed face, with the air of a hydrocephalic asparagus.
The eyes are drowned in the opium of universal indulgence, the clown’s mouth bewitches like a peculiar geranium.
Mouth which goes from the unbunged hole, glacially hilarious, to the transcendental elusiveness of the Mona Lisa’s empty smile.
Planting their floury conical hat above the black silk headband, they make their crow’s-feet laugh and wrinkle their nose like clover.
As stone-setting on their ring they have the Egyptian scarab, in their buttonhole the wasteland dandelion sits well.
They make their way, nourished on blue sky! and occasionally on vegetables too, on rice whiter than their costume, on mandarins and hard-boiled eggs.
They are of the Pallid sect, having nothing to do with God, and they whistle: ‘All is for the best in the best of mid-Lent masquerades!’
1886. Prose translation by William Rees.
