The ardent daughter of Spain, rendered more impassioned by the American sky, puts her hand on the creature of the flame, and seizes upon it as her own. She makes it a talisman, a jewel, and a victim. Burning, she places it on her burning bosom, where it must soon perish.
There is no purpose to which she does not turn it. By a triumph of audacious coquetry, linking the insects with silk, or imprisoning them in gauze, she wreathes the animated flames in glowing necklaces, and rolls them around her waist in girdles of fire. The queens of the ball are crowned with an infernal diadem of living topazes, of throbbing emeralds, which flicker or gleam (through suffering or love?). A brilliant but funereal decoration, of sinister magnetism, whose charm is enhanced by a sentiment of death. They dance; the waning flame associates its tender gleams with the languishing glances of a deep black eye. They dance; without end and without reason, without pity or remembrance of the amorous light dying and fading on their bosom, and having no power to say: "Replace me where you captured me!"
VI.—THE SILKWORM.