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Smoke

出版	Independently Published, 2020-05-13
主題	Fiction / Action & AdventureFiction / ClassicsFiction / Historical / General
ISBN	9798639233487
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=Yl-PzQEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋On the 10th of August 1862, at four o'clock in the afternoon, a great number of people were thronging before the well-known Konversation in Baden-Baden. The weather was lovely; everything around-the green trees, the bright houses of the gay city, and the undulating outline of the mountains-everything was in holiday mood, basking in the rays of the kindly sunshine; everything seemed smiling with a sort of blind, confiding delight; and the same glad, vague smile strayed over the human faces too, old and young, ugly and beautiful alike. Even the blackened and whitened visages of the Parisian demi-monde could not destroy the general impression of bright content and elation, while their many-coloured ribbons and feathers and the sparks of gold and steel on their hats and veils involuntarily recalled the intensified brilliance and light fluttering of birds in spring, with their rainbow-tinted wings. But the dry, guttural snapping of the French jargon, heard on all sides could not equal the song of birds, nor be compared with it. Everything, however, was going on in its accustomed way. The orchestra in the Pavilion played first a medley from the Traviata, then one of Strauss's waltzes, then 'Tell her, ' a Russian song, adapted for instruments by an obliging conductor. In the gambling saloons, round the green tables, crowded the same familiar figures, with the same dull, greedy, half-stupefied, half-exasperated, wholly rapacious expression, which the gambling fever lends to all, even the most aristocratic, features. The same well-fed and ultra-fashionably dressed Russian landowner from Tambov with wide staring eyes leaned over the table, and with uncomprehending haste, heedless of the cold smiles of the croupiers themselves, at the very instant of the cry ' rien ne va plus, ' laid with perspiring hand golden rings of louis d'or on all the four corners of the roulette, depriving himself by so doing of every possibility of gaining anything, even in case of success