Papers the Room with Proposals.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXII, Issue II, 9 January 1904, Page 61

Papers the Room with Proposals.

BELLE THUS USES TOKENS OF CUPID’S KINDNESS. Among unique wall decorators the young heiress to a million who has covered the walls of her boudoir with the offers of marriage she has received since her debut certainly takes the lead. But the desire to escape from the hackneyed and commonplace some times degenerates into the grotesque, as these examples of wall papers which are not to be bought in the usual emporiums of house decoration will show. Among the Chinese there is a craze for postage stamp apartments, but the immensity of patience required before the four walls are properly covered in the minute squares renders it unlikely as a modern American fashion. A Berlin beauty, however, had an idea akin to it. having her boudoir papered entirely in coloured pictorial postcards, collected from every part of the world, and representing both landscapes and figures of every sort and kind. A more charming originality is that of the traveller, who, when he finally settled down, had his room arranged as if a cabin on board a yacht, with port holes, life buoys, and everything he could think of to create the illusion of having still the great wide seas tearing past on either side of him. The singer Mario, who became the prince of Candia, and who married the great Grisi, had a room covered with newspaper clippings containing enthusiastic notices of his wife. The. King of Cambodia has hidden the walls of his palace with portraits of his wives. The

longest part of the work was the photographer’s. Eight thousand women make up the royal harems, and to stick the photographs on the wall was a comparatively simple process to satisfying the 8000 ladies upon so nice a point as their own likenesses. Mme. Nillson, the great singer, has papered one room in her house at Madrid with the songs she has sung most successfully. A New York dentist has also hidden his walls in memories of his life work. But as he could hardly conceal the walls with embedded teeth extracted from his patients he has replaced them by playing cards—one for each tooth drawn. He has already pasted 6000 cards —“in memoriam.” An Englishman, on the other hand, has contrived a unique wall paper with travelling tickets—railway, steamer, and street car. In order to keep the first two he had always to pay an extra sum, and even then many struggles ensued before he was at last allowed to issue triumphantly with his fragment of mural decoration. In the centre of the room are the tickets of the

collector’s honeymoon trip. Perhaps as an offset to the girl mentioned in the beginning, a morose French eccentric papers his walls with the deep bordered invitation cards received to the funerals of friends and acquaintances.