The Azure Rose - The Original Classic Edition

This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work by Reginald Wright Kauffman, which is now, at last, again available to you.

Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside The Azure Rose:

Here were the good photographs of good pictures, bought second-hand; the bad copies of good pictures, made by Cartaret himself during long mornings in the Louvre, where impudent tourists, staring at his work, jolted his elbow and craned their necks beside his cheek; there were the plaster-casts on brackets-casts of antiques more mutilated than the antiques themselves; and here, too, were the rows of lost endeavors in the shape of discarded canvases banked on the floor along the walls and [17] sometimes jutting far out into the room. Two or three chairs were scattered about, one with a broken leg-he remembered the party at which it was broken; across from the fire-place was Cartaret's bed that a tarnished Oriental cover (made in Lyons) converted by day into a divan; and close beside the rear window, flanked by the table on which he mixed his colors, stood, almost at the elbow of this imperious intruder, Cartaret's own easel with a virgin canvas in position, waiting to receive the successor to that picture which he had sold for a song a few hours ago.

...Cartaret's gaze returned to the door and, presently, encountered the old deadlatch that antedated his tenancy and that he had never once used: it was a deadlatch of a type antiquated even in the Latin Quarter, tough and enduring; years ago it had been pushed back and held open by a small catch; the knob whereby it was originally worked from inside the room had been broken off; and now the catch had slipped, the spring-bolt had shot home and, the knob being broken, the girl and Cartaret were as much prisoners in the room as if the lock had been on the other side of the door.

...His mustache was fierce enough to grace the upper lip of a deputy from the Bouches-du-Rhône and generous enough to spare many a contribution to the plat-du-jour; but his mustache was the only large thing about him-always excepting Madame his wife, who was ever somewhere about him and who was just now, two hundred and twenty pounds of evidence to the good food of the Deux Colombes, stuffed into a wire cage at one end of the bar, and bulging out of it, her eyebrows meeting over her [39] pug-nose and the heap of hair leaping from her head nearly to the ceiling, while her lips and fingers were busy adding the bills from déjeuner.

...Certainly there was more room here than he wanted, but he had grown to love the place: [53] even then, when he had still to see it in the rose-pink twilight of romance, in the afterglow that was a dawn-even then, before the apparition of the strange Lady-he loved it as his sort of man must love the scenes of those struggles which have left him poor.