"Rococo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... evening and was charmed at the very first glance. Oscar's residence was a little Louis Quinze chateau buried in the trees; irregularly built, but charmingly picturesque. It had been left unaltered for a century at least, and everything, from the blackened mansard roofs with their rococo weather-cocks, to the bay windows with their tiny squares of glass and the fantastic escutcheon over the door, was in keeping. Over the thick tiles of the somewhat sunken roof, the rough-barked old chestnuts lazily stretched their branches. Creepers and climbing roses wantoned ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... describing it. It was very large, circular, the floor covered with very fine matting. All round it was a little raised platform, covered with divans. The walls were entirely formed of great mirrors, in splendid rococo frames of carved wood, gilt. It was evidently the room in which the harem festivals were held. Between the mirrors were eight little doors, every one leading to a small apartment for one woman, fitted with mirrors ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... bright large lamp that burned within, but along the passage and up the stairs. I followed them, resolutely beating down shyness, unwillingness, timidity. My reluctant steps took me to the window of the antiquity shop, and I stood looking in before I could make up my mind to enter. Bits of rococo ware stood in the window, majolica jugs, chased metal dishes and bowls, bits of Renaissance work, tapestry, carpet, a helm with the vizor up, gaping at me as if tired of being there. I slowly drew my purse from my pocket, put together ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... the present day, an ungrateful task for an intelligent reader or a conscientious reviewer, it is to be obliged to deal with a work whose whole compass is merely that of a second-rate romance inspired by rococo sentimentalism. We regret to speak thus of a book by so eminent a writer as Mrs. Stowe; but when any one at this time undertakes to build up a novel out of such material as cloisters, monks, and nuns, Beato Angelico and frankincense, cavaliers and Savonarola, with the occasional 'purple ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... critics were, the better. For himself the speaker said that he liked that old custom of printing the very finest things in italics when it came to citing corroborative passages. It had not only the charm of the rococo, the pathos of a bygone fashion, but it was of the greatest use. No one is the worse for having a great beauty pointed out in the author one is reading or reading from. Sometimes one does not see the given beauty at first, and then he has the pleasure of puzzling ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... and commonplace crowds are indeed good things, like violets and geraniums; but they do not go together. A billycock is a beautiful object (it may be eagerly urged), but it is not in the same style of architecture as Ely Cathedral; it is a dome, a small rococo dome in the Renaissance manner, and does not go with the pointed arches that assault heaven like spears. A char-a-banc is lovely (it may be said) if placed upon a pedestal and worshipped for its own sweet ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... second-hand hearsays, systems, and traditions, had looked God's Word and his own soul in the face, and determined to act on that which he had found. And therefore it is that to open his works at any stray page, after these effeminate Carolists, is like falling asleep in a stifling city drawing-room, amid Rococo French furniture, not without untidy traces of last night's ball, and awaking in an Alpine valley, amid the scent of sweet cyclamens and pine boughs, to the music of trickling rivulets and shouting hunters, beneath the dark cathedral aisles of mighty trees, and here and there, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... thrusting it towards me; "look at it!" Obediently I took the trinket from him, and, examining it as well as I might, saw that a letter was engraved upon it, one of those ornamental initials surrounded by rococo scrolls and flourishes. "What letter does it bear?" asked the man in a ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... her candle upon a tiny rococo table, and seated herself in a quaint, low chair overtopped by two tiny ivory horns that spread like hands of blessing above her head. The doctor declined to sit down, but stood with one hand upon the fragile table ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... donjon, he reaches a little plateau where, in the seventeenth century, Georges Philibert de Sequigny, Lord of the Glandier, Maisons-Neuves and other places, built the existing town in an abominably rococo style of architecture. ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... park, and then walked through a mile of the Coryston demesne, till he reached the lake and saw beyond it the Italian garden, with its statues glittering in the early sun—and the long marble front of the house, with its rococo ornament, and its fine pillared loggia. "What the deuce are we going to do with these places!" he asked himself in petulant despair. "And to think that Arthur won't be allowed to sell it, or turn it to any useful ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... erroneous belief in the marketable value of Danish ballads, Welsh triads, Russian folk-songs, and the like in rococo English translations after the Bowring pattern led Borrow to exchange an attorney's office for a garret in Grub-street. His immediate ambition was something between Goldsmith's and Chatterton's ballads, Homeric odes, epics, plays; he was, at all hazards, to write something grand—"to be stared at, ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... pair at every turn; in the picture gallery, standing before Durer's Evangelists; in the hall of sculpture examining Egina's marbles; in the rococo theater of the Residence, where Mozart was sung, an audience hall of a former century, with decorations of porcelain and garlands which seemed to require that the spectators wear the purple heel and the white wig. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a site in the very middle of Broadway, of the lower, the real Broadway, where it could throb with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocently rejoiced—believing it, I surmise, the liveliest conceivable: a fact that is by itself, in the light of the present, an odd rococo note. The lower Broadway—I allude to the whole Fourth Street and Bond Street (where now is the Bond Street of that antiquity?)—was then a seat of education, since we had not done with it, as I shall presently show, even when we had done ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... of mediaeval times, has reached practically every fashionable hostelry. Yet we may be only at the beginning, as in this vicious circle of craving for sensual life and talking about sexual problems the erotic transformation of the whole social behaviour is usually a rapid one. The Rococo age reached many subtleties, which we do not dream of as yet, but to which the conspiracy against silence may boldly push us. Read the memoirs of Casanova, the Italian of the eighteenth century, whose ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... decorated with memorials of famous 'Stock Exchange' worthies and merchants, and nothing could be more skilful than the enrichment of these conventional records, which are made to harmonize by florid rococo decorations with the Spanish genre and encrusted with bronzes and marbles. This admirable and original monument is in itself worth a ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... because they have never been in storage, but in constant use, while the moods and fashions have been put away and taken out a thousand times. Most people have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in them that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... bad. They're rather creditable; but," Austin added, turning with a laugh to his brother, "the mother will fidget, you know, and the somewhat—let us say rococo style of architecture has got on her nerves. I think the whole thing had better come down, ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... weegeet, the Home of the Water Fairies. [Footnote: Also called from a legend, Oonahgemessuk k'tubbee, the Water Fairies' Spring. This appropriate and beautiful name has been rejected in favor of the ridiculously rococo term "Diana's Bath." As there is a "Diana's Bath" at almost every summer watering place in America, North Conway must of course have one. The absolute antipathy which the majority of Americans manifest for the ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Ass, with, again, a sort of prologue and epilogue of modern love. It is undoubtedly a fine piece of work of its kind and beautifully written. But in itself it seems to me a little too much of a tour de force, and its kind a little rococo. Again, mea maxima culpa perhaps. On the other hand, Soeur Beatrix is a most charmingly told version of a very wide-spread story—that of Our Lady taking the place of an erring sister during her sojourn in the world, and restoring her to it without any scandal when she returns repentant and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... declined; it was soon replaced by more prosaic forms, and now the tools no longer exist that can make it. Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones would have admired it. America, excepting in New York City, escaped the false rococo taste of the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Paris for Greene's novel, and it was printed accordingly in French in 1722, this time adorned with engravings.[140] They show "Doraste" dressed as a marquis of Louis XV.'s time; while "Pandolphe" wears a flowing wig under his cocked hat, and sits on a throne in rococo style. A copy of the book was purchased for the royal library, and is still to be seen at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, with the crown and cipher of his Most Christian Majesty ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... frugal allowance of wood was smouldering on a couple of fire-dogs on the hearth. And on the chimney-piece above stood a foggy mirror and a modern clock with an inlaid wooden case; Fraisier had picked it up at an execution sale, together with the tawdry imitation rococo candlesticks, with the zinc beneath showing through the lacquer in ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... inexorable stoker, grimily lurking behind the glittering rococo-work, should decide that this set of riders had had their pennyworth, and bring the whole concern of steam-engine, horses, mirrors, trumpets, drums, cymbals, and such-like to pause and silence, he waited for her every reappearance, ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... imposing range of glass—scattered about here, there, and everywhere; not as if they were a rare and holiday treat, but a most common, every-day occurrence. There is not much work to be seen about, and not a book! On the other hand, lounging-chairs, suited to the length or shortness of any back; rococo photograph stands, framing either a great many men, or a few men in a great many attitudes; soothing pictures—decollete Venuses, Love's greuze heads—tied up with rose-ribbon, and a sleepy half-light. On a small table at the ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... one knows, may strike as freshly as ever—they were not according to the Ideal of their own time—just now, they drop into the ready ear,—next hundred years, who will be the Rossini? who is no longer the Rossini even I remember—his early overtures are as purely Rococo as Cimarosa's or more. The sounds remain, keep their character perhaps—the scale's proportioned notes affect the same, that is,—the major third, or minor seventh—but the arrangement of these, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... for them with phlegm. They picked up not only carved olive-oil tanks and well-heads and fifteenth-century iron-work gates from ancient and impoverished gardens, but a contemporarily copied Della Robbia fireplace, and designs for Renaissance ceilings, and a rococo carved and painted altar-piece from a mountain church whose parroco was hard-up, and a piece of 1480 tapestry that Peter loved very much, whereon St. Anne and other saints played among roses and raspberries, beautiful to behold. These things made both the picker-up and ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... specially Platonic influence which the Renaissance exercised on both.[142] Sidney, however full of it elsewhere, put less of it in his actual novel; while, on the other hand, nothing did so much to create and spread the rather rococo notion of pseudo-platonic love in France, and from France throughout Europe, as the Astree itself. The further union of the philosophic mind with an eminently cavalier temperament—the united ethos of scholar, soldier, lover, and courtier—fills out the comparison: and dwarfs ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... spoilt by flaws such as every Mrs. Moggridge can point out,—faces that begin in one style and end in another, half Greek perhaps and half Gothic; yet even such faces, if their individuality is strong enough, have their own rococo charm. For all but supremely great faces, of which perhaps the world has not seen half-a-dozen, absolute regularity, so-called correctness, of features is a calamity, and regular beauty on the ordinary human levels is only another ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... "Brixtonian rococo outwardly," I said, "as far as I can judge; but very snug inside. No doubt you could show us something we should like which would also satisfy your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... the smell of carbolic acid. But the maison Schwirtz was almost clean. It had an impassioned green carpet, a bedspring which scarcely sagged at all, a gas-range, and at least a dozen vases with rococo handles and blobs ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... out of which he smiled like a parvenu in all his glory. When at home, Madame Ragon completed her natural self with a little King Charles spaniel, which presented a surprisingly harmonious effect as it lay on the hard little sofa, rococo in shape, that assuredly never played the part assigned to the ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... for decoration originate? The inhabitants of Florence and Athens did not consider it necessary. There must, I feel sure, be a reason for its use in this city; American land-lords rarely spend money without a purpose; perhaps they find that rococo detail draws business ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... wrote conventionally when he was plain Walter Whitman, living in Brooklyn. But he imitated Ossian and Blake, and their singing robes ill-befitted his burly frame. If, in Poe, there is much "rant and rococo," Whitman is mostly yawping and yodling. He is destitute of humour, like the majority of "prophets" and uplifters, else he might have realised that a Democracy based on the "manly love of comrades" is ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... threads and make another 5 stitches. The groups of long stitches above and beneath the first row, encroach over two threads of the first group, so that a space of only four threads remains between two groups. The stitch between these groups is generally known as the rococo stitch. ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... great. As for celebrities, they seemed to be merely a by-product of the gay, animated, beautifully gowned throngs: people she had heard of, people more important still of whom she had never heard, people important only to themselves of whom nobody had ever heard thronged the great rococo rooms. The best hotel orchestra in America played there; the loveliest flowers, the most magnificent jewels, the most celebrated cuisine in the entire Republic—all were there for Athalie Greensleeve to wonder at and to enjoy. There were other things for her to wonder at, too,—the seemingly exhaustless ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... underfoot the carpet was soft inches deep with fern and moss. As for the flowers—Jacqueline wanted to pluck them all, to wreathe the wondering fawns, as ladies with picture hats do in the old frivolous rococo fantasies. And as to that, she might have been one of those Watteau ladies herself, so rich was the coloring there, and she in the foreground so white, so soft of skin, so sylvan and aristocratic ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... business, and every house had now on the lower floor an expensive little shop with monsieur sitting complacently at the door and madame, fat and voluble, at the money-drawer, and on the floor above, a still more expensive suite of rooms to let—rooms panelled in white and gold, resplendent with rococo mouldings, and crowded with abominable furniture, intended to be coquettish—gilt chairs, scalloped tables, embroidered lambrequins, ottomans smothered in plush and fringe, beds draped with curtains until they were all but air-tight—in ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... in this reaction, cathedrals and churches, which in the previous century had been regarded by men of culture as mere barbaric masses of stone and mortar, to be masked without by classic colonnades and within by rococo work in stucco and papier mache, became even more beloved than in the thirteenth century. Even men who were repelled by theological disputations were fascinated and made devoted reactionists by the newly revealed beauties of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... regard to the question of dress, we should say that for elderly ladies black satin or velvet, or any of the combination dresses so fashionable now, with handsome lace, and Swedish gloves of pearl or tan color (not white kids; these are decidedly rococo, and not in fashion), would be appropriate. A black satin, well made, and trimmed with beaded passementerie, is perhaps the handsomest dress that could be worn by any one. Brocaded silk, plain gros grain, anything that a lady would wear at the wedding reception of her daughter is suitable, although ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... of dingy, uninteresting alleys, between modern tenements, until about ten minutes later they stood before an old three-storied building, which had a frontage of four windows on the street. "This is our place," said the detective, looking up at the tall, handsome gateway and the rococo carvings that ornamented the front of this decaying dwelling. It was very evidently of a different age and class from those ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... of her early impressions was naturally that of the house in which she was to live. It was big and roomy; it was detached, and thus open to light and air. But its elephantine woodwork repelled her, for she had grown up amid the rococo exuberances of Paris apartments. The heavy honesty of black-walnut depressed her after the gilded stucco of her mother's salon. And that huge, portentous orchestrion took up ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... not, even though his senses have undergone no elemental change. Paganism was succeeded by Christianity, and with Christianity came a new art canon, new forms of beauty and harmony—the Early Italian. The age of reason followed, bringing with it the Baroque and Rococo canons: and as time went on, and the world's mind kept working, came other canons still. The most recent canon appears to be that of naturalism (the Emperor's "gutter ") with which artists are now experimentalizing. None of the canons, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... the portrait of some aristocratic Mesalina, and was tactful enough to let Cupid hold the mirror in which she tests her majestic allure with cold satisfaction. He looks as though his task were becoming burdensome enough. The picture is painted flattery. Later an 'expert' in the Rococo period baptized the lady with the name of Venus. The furs of the despot in which Titian's fair model wrapped herself, probably more for fear of a cold than out of modesty, have become a symbol of the tyranny and cruelty that constitute ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals and Shephera's Pipe (1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, {95} The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, which Shakspere quoted in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... on the mantelpiece whispered obscene secrets into the ears of Saint Cecilia. The argent limbs of Antinous brushed against the garments of Mona Lisa. And from a corner a little rococo lady peered coquettishly at the gray image of an Egyptian sphinx. There was a picture of Napoleon facing the image of the Crucified. Above all, in the semi-darkness, artificially produced by ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... I began with the rococo image of a Pegasus, poised in the air, flashing and curvetting, petulantly refusing to alight on any expected spot. Let me return to it in closing, that I may suggest our only sage attitude to be one ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... a station far up in the Bronx, and after looking carefully about he started off toward the west, where the mushroom growth of the new city sprang up in rows of rococo brick and stone houses with oases of green fields and open lots between. He turned up a little lane of tiny frame houses, each set in its trim garden, and stopped at ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... adorned with marble placques of various colors, garnished with medallions and consoles; then a great rose-colored wall in which is cut a large window with columnets; all styles are found there—the Byzantine, the Saracen, the Lombard, the Gothic, the Roman, the Greek, and even the Rococo; the column and the columnet; the lancet and the semicircle; the fanciful capital, full of birds and of flowers, brought from Acre or from Jaffa; the Greek capital found in Athenian ruins; the mosaic and the bas-relief; the classic severity ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... rest; and in that new middle age which their genius has evoked, the poetry of the Pleiad has found its place. At first, with Malherbe, you may think it, like the architecture, the whole mode of life, the very dresses of that time, fantastic, faded, rococo. But if you look long enough to understand it, to conceive its sentiment, you will find that those wanton lines have a spirit guiding their caprices. For there is style there; one temper has shaped the whole; and everything that has style, that has been done as no other ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... always quite satisfactorily to the reader—makes for, and flits about, half-a-dozen different forms of verse. Now it is the equivalenced octosyllable of the Coleridgean stamp rather than of Scott's or Byron's; now trochaic decasyllabics of a rather rococo kind; and once at least a splendid anapaestic couplet, which catches the ear and clings to the ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... and has its spout curved upward at the top, being furnished with a small, hinged flap and a scroll-shaped thumb-piece attached to the rim of the cover. The body and cover were originally quite plain, the embossing and chasing with symmetrical rococo decoration being added later, probably about 1740. Jackson says the wooden handle is not the original one, which was probably C-shaped. The pot bears the usual London hall-marks for the year 1692 and the maker's mark is "G G" upon a shaped shield, a mark recorded upon the copper plate belonging ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... homes of trades-folk, it seems in every sense a church of the people. Here the native Nicois, gay, industrious, mercurial, and dispossessed of his town, may feel truly at home. Finished in the most exuberant rococo style, it is an edifice from which all architectural or religious inspiration is conspicuously absent. It is a revel of luxurious bad taste; a Cathedral in Provence, a Cathedral by the Sea, but neither ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... kind of charm as the early painters of Florence. Out of that "infancy," however, there had arisen no "titanically infantine" Michelangelo, but a race of accomplished petits maitres, whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the rococo age. A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light songs of their contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated charm; but Browning, with the eternal April in his heart and brain, heard in the stately measures it danced to, only ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... religion (which might be, and certainly was, a thing very different from purity and goodness): the Renaissance temples remind us of a studious period passionately enamored of the classic past; in the rococo architecture and sculpture of a later time, we have the idle swagger, the unmeaning splendor, the lawless luxury, of an age corrupted by its own opulence, and proud of its licentious slavery. Had anything come of the aesthetic sensation immediately ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various |
