.
Later, many young women in their guileless sweet zeal sent me their favorite perfume to thank me from the heart for a beauty tip of my devising, namely that every perfume ought to be rubbed into the skin all over the naked body right after the bath so that it wafts forth like the body’s own true natural essence! But all these perfumes were like the scents of breathtakingly beautiful but rather poisonous exotic flowers. Only the fragrance Peau d’Espagne, Pinaud, from Paris, brought me a melancholic tranquility, even though Mama was no longer there and could no longer forgive me for my sins!
Women are enormously impressionable, they so easily take on the smells of their surroundings! If she was in the dairy, then for hours afterwards she’ll smell of milk, her hands, her hair, her entire body—. If she was at the green grocers, she’ll retain for hours the smell of all the greens, like a mixed vegetable soup—. In the garden she smells of lilacs or linden trees or just of garden—. On the high mountain meadow of cow pasture land and fresh cut meadow. This is a tragic fate; since she always smells afterwards of the last lout she was with, of the last snob and his repulsive scent, his foul odor of duplicity! She never smells of poets since poets keep a respectful distance, probably on account of their artistic egotism. Most often women smell of “smart alecks” always too close for comfort! That’s when they are most receptive to smells—. Noble ladies definitely ought to remain outdoors in nature or stick to the saintly solitude of their own domicile. It stinks everywhere else!
Even good books never stink, they are the distillation of all the malodorous sins one has committed of which one has finally managed to extract a drop of fragrant humanity!
But the other sins can’t be distilled!
There are geniuses among the tulips, too, just as there are in every manifestation of the organic! Like orchids, for instance. I once had a white tulip that stayed shut tight, immaculate and virginal, for a full fourteen days despite the warmth of my room and water. Only then did it open and brazenly display its stamen and its pistil. And so it remained for another eight days. Others, for instance, will open on the spot in a warm room and water, and are already complete in all their splendor; their petals fall as if stunned by the blow. Still others, especially the speckled ones, evidently just shrivel up like little old grannies, without losing their petals they die off, doggedly resisting life. You throw them away even though there could still be a little spare life left in them! And it may well be so. Tulips are not without smell, they exude to the eyes! It may well be the most exciting, longest lasting scent there is!
Six A.M. It is dry, cool, the sky is a wan white blue, bleu-lacté the French writers would say—.
A florist dealing in artificial flowers flings back gray wooden shutters, open for business.
In the dusty window display, spring blooms in sloe blossoms; summer in cornflowers; fall in pink and lilac asters and the feathery pompoms of dandelions.
A pale shop girl carries white roses out into the street, with which she decorates a carriage parked outside. The flowers smell like old muslin.
Flower Allée—or this afternoon at four! Box seats, five crowns! Let’em spread the money among the people, thousands profit indirectly, you have no idea! It trickles down to—Why it’s just impossible to think it all the way through.
Out in the street, a young woman with a sleeping child in her arms stares at the “flying bed of roses,” a slice of “enchantment,” roses and a horse-drawn carriage, the mystery of the “beautiful superfluous!”
The child sleeps soundly in the clear morning air.
From a first floor window, a young prostitute in her nightgown peeks out from behind a white shade: “Should I hire the carriage, should I not, should I, should I not, should I—?”
The shop girl looks up: “Slut—!”
The shop girl yawns, sticks a rose into the coachman’s buttonhole.
The young mother with the child walks on. The child sleeps soundly in the clear morning air.
The prostitute pulls down the shade.
The rose-carriage rolls off; the roses sway, bow, rustle, tremble in the breeze, and one tumbles to the asphalt—
That afternoon, a woman and a young girl hire the carriage.
“Les fleurs sont fausses—,” the girl observes.
“ ‘S ’at so—,” says the woman, “is it really that obvious?!”
Flower Allée. Access via the Praterstrasse. Flying flower bed. Thousands profit indirectly!
The young prostitute lies in her bed, asleep. The afternoon sun warms the white shade. She is dreaming: “Rose carriage—.”
The shop girl reclines on a little whicker chair in the dark, dank artificial flower storeroom, asleep—. She is dreaming: “Rose carriage—.”
The young woman carries her child through the streets. The child sleeps soundly in the misty afternoon air—.
The rose that tumbled that morning from the passing carriage stands tall in a glass on a street sweeper’s window sill.
His little daughter says: “Yuck, it stinks—.”
To which the street sweeper might have replied: “These are the flowers that blossom on the asphalt of a big city—!” But that’s not what he said. A simple man—it just wasn’t his way—. He muses: “Must be from the Flower Allée—!”
This Max, my uncle, who’s been dead for seven years now, was once very handsome, indeed, extremely handsome, even according to modern standards. Exceedingly slender, exceedingly tall, and with a pug nose. Consequently, he had a love affair with his mother’s, my grand-mamma’s, very young seamstress.
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