ON HOLD
I have a confession to make, I have a mistress (and here, if my wife reads me, I am ruined..), a mistress with whom I have been having relations for almost half a century (and how do you not get tired?... you will ask me...), a mistress who has never betrayed my expectations, who always has surprises in store for me (pleasant, eh... a mistress can't reprimand you or incuporate you as if she were a wife..). I went to see her again last week, confident that this time too she would be ready for my cravings, willing to open up and give me everything I would ask of her... and this last time I was fulfilled even more than usual, if possible, in my most difficult desires and fantasies....
My mistress's name is Paris (if my wife has read this far, fine, if not, if she has stopped at the first few lines I am ruined... tonight when I get home I will find the suitcases outside the door...), and the incredible surprise she gave me this time consists in her giving me this very splendid, very brilliant, very precious and very unobtainable Louis XV in the mythical Green Alps marble... You don't find them, of fireplaces in Verde Alpi, and when perhaps one is found it is decidedly unlikely to be a “simple” Pompadour. This fact (excuse the long-windedness, but some things have to be explained...) depends on the cost of this marble in the nineteenth century, a cost that was HIGH due to the fact that its quarrying could only be done in a period of 30 days a year (try you, without modern means, to quarry marble at 20 degrees below zero, in the mountains, among rocks and ice..) and so, given its enormous nineteenth-century cost, with Verde Alpi at that time only fireplaces were made on very important commissions, or this same marble was used to make “encrustations” (small insertions) on fireplaces built in less expensive marbles... in short, a few “bits” of it were used to ennoble a less important fireplace.
Instead, in this case we have a fireplace built entirely of precious Green Alps marble. not only that: said fireplace was made with marble slabs very (indeed, perfectly) homogeneous with each other (which does not always happen, in fact, it almost never happens..), without regard to its thicknesses and the quality (and quality costs..) of its polishing, in short, we are really faced with an “Excellence”..
It's been at least a decade since I've seen (and owned..) one like it, despite the fact that we continually, and all over Europe, search for such fireplaces and such color (sought after by women and architects..).
Well, I have written the novelette, surely only one in a thousand of you will have reached the end of my rant, and I thank this patient gentleman by proposing said fireplace more or less at the normal price of such a model in “beautiful” color, despite the fact that here we are in front of a marble and a “stunning” color...
Parisian provenance, perfect preservation, great lady's patina, 1860-80s period.
