Gemmes Story Page 1A

Leonard Rosenthal: “Au Jardin des Gemmes” with Illustrations by Léon Carée

A Granite Bay Design Microsite (Plus a Separate Gallery of Other Carée Artwork) ->

“Here again today is a new volume whose gems, and especially the three most wonderful colored stones: emerald, ruby ​​and sapphire, are the subject…”

Before he begins to leaf through these pages devoted to colored stones, I must account to the reader of my intentions and my purpose. My job is not to write, and yet I published, two and a half years ago, a work entitled “In the Kingdom of the Pearl”, and here again today is a new volume whose gems, and especially the three most wonderful colored stones: emerald, ruby ​​and sapphire, are the subject. Why did I want to write it?

Visit the gallery featuring Léon Carée’s Other Illustrations.

Authorial vanity is foreign to me; the subject is not new. But just as love has formed the theme of countless different novels, so precious stones may be the theme of a different book than those that have been published since people have been writing and reading. I must therefore say that life has not only led me to buy and sell gems: it has given me the favor of loving them for themselves, of taking an intellectual interest in them. Plies were not only objects of exchange for me: they appeared to me as creations of nature, endowed with a mysterious existence and singular powers, and little by little I was attracted by their secret life.