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She adored the Passage des Panoramas. It was a passion surviving from her youth, a passion for the gaudiness of fancy goods, fake jewels, gilt zinc and cardboard with the appearance of leather. When she passed that way she could not tear herself from the window-displays. She felt the same now as during the period when she was a down-at-heel street urchin and used to forget herself in front of the confectionery in a chocolate-maker's, while listening to a barrel-organ playing in a neighboring shop. She was taken especially by the pressing attraction of cheap knick-knacks, requisites in walnut-shells, necessaries in small containers, rag-picker's baskets for tooth-picks, Vendome columns and obelisks containing thermometers.
Nana: A Realistic Novel, 1880 quoted in The Artificial Kingdom, p. 29 by Celeste Olalquiaga Image: Charles Dodgson, Alice Liddell as a Beggar Girl, Late 1850s |
 We suppose that in a few months the glittering palace of iron and glass, the most unique and remarkable building in the world, will be as entirely a thing of the past as the ice-palace of the Empress of Russia that thawed in the summer sun.
Saturday, October 11, 1851 Image: Toronto Eaton Centre |
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