Excerpt from Theophile Gautier's Short Stories: The Fleece of Gold, the Dead Leman, Poems, Etc It was on this disappointing experience that Gautier built up the pretty tale Of The Fleece of Gold in which the hero is, naturally enough, a painter in search of just the same rarity, and, like Gautier, finds one specimen only. To have made the heroine of the tale a mere blowsy kitchen-wench would not, how ever, have suited the author's temperament. Gautier above all things was an artist: a lover of the Beautiful in its most refined and most exquisite form: quite capable, therefore, of idealising the somewhat gross type he had come upon in Valenciennes into the ethereal and delicate maiden engaged in the congenial and appropriate occupation of making lace instead Of sweeping the gutter. Beyond this. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.