Pestalozzi, his teeth clenched. A garnet cross, dark red moments of domestic shade. Rings, brooches: unbelieved marvel. And the ruby and the emerald shone and lay in the trench of the little mouse-skin bed, fellow tenants of the moment with the verecond ambages of the pearl, on the worn and almost ragged tegument of that old woman's couch: amid the precious gleam and the twists or polygons of the gold objects that kindled the minds, after the pupils and the retinas. Pins and earrings were tangled in the little chains, or mixed up with one another, like twin cherries amid the twinned stems of their sisterly couples: the pendants, in the immediate cataract, had taken the rings with them. Ruby and emerald took on a name and a body on the gray poverty of the cloth, or of the tatter, in the closed mute splendor innate in certain beings and signifying their rarity, their natural and intrinsic dignity: that mineralogical virtue which through false fanfares and winks is trumpeted so often, in trumpeting carnivals, by so many bits of bottle-bottoms, as, in said derrieres, the quality is totally lacking. The corundum, pleochroic crystals, revealed itself as such on the rat-gray of the ambience, come from Ceylon or from Burma, or from Siam, noble in its structural accepting—splendid green or splendid red, or night-blue, also—of the crystallographic suggestion of God: memory, every gem, and individual opus within the remote memory and within the labors of God: true sesquioxide A2O3 truly spaced in the ditrigonal scalenohedral modes of its class, premediated by God: despite the value-work of the Gadfly.{66} Gadfly di Revello who was to last in his chair for an hour, chief economist of the Turkey and cock-minister of his screwed nonfinances: which, at a wink from the Big Cheese himself would have revealed to the Italians the new heaven of the flaskable values, substituting in the zodiacal band of credit and monetary circulation, for the gold standard which then went to Hell to be liquified, the scorpion of humbug which we'll never be rid of again. And the Italiener from that fiasco-flask, drank greedily in big gulps.
Pestalozzi, no, he wasn't a Minister of Finance of Italy: and neither was la Menegazzi. Both of them had a certain sense of value and nonvalue: she, if for nothing else, to be able to satisfy the whim of forgetting in the bathroom all about value (the topaz) inasmuch as she wouldn't have got any pleasure, in any part of her dithyrambic and trembling body, in forgetting in the bathroom nonvalue: a bottle-bottom. Jewels they were, those resplendent rubies, that was obvious, incubated and born in the originative millennia of the world. The expert could check and guarantee this, despite the cuts, the faceting, the polishing of art. Gems crystallized naturally from fused sesquioxide, following the principles of the system: and not a crystallized pretense in a light, a glory of falsehood, from a basin of excrement. As the impetus, the grief of a soul freezes in a cry, coagulates in notation, following the formal processes of thought: in a frozen cry! which is its own, and not the bawl of another, or of the market place of bawlings and of souls. The corporal scattered them with his fingers, with the gesture of a cook sorting rice before throwing it into the pot, scattered the stones, the jewels, the gold ornaments, the fabulous caramels, shining gems of the Maharajah in the depression of the miserable blanket. Of those appearances, wisps of gold or luminous grains on the dark color of the drapery, a dotted line stood out, like a string (seen, however, from above, and from afar, from a mountain or a plane) of electric globes in the curve of the Riviera: such as the illumination of Botafogo beads, in the bananiferous nights, all around the base of the Pao de Azucar. Those jewels, at that moment, seemed to burst and play over the bed from the mingled amassment of diverse thieving coups. But Pestalozzi, with a certain applied hesitation at first, then with smug certainty, thought that he could gradually recognize, in that scattered