Quelques pauvres fleurs étiolées penchaient languissament la tête comme des jeunes filles poitrinaires, attendant qu’un rayon de soleil vînt sécher leurs feuille à moitié pourries.Each girl, on entering the wizard’s service, had been required, volens nolens, to swallow a seed, small, black, and enchanted, whereby she became an anthetaira, or flower-harlot, seeing day by day her skin viridesce, feeling her flesh alter, her blood thicken to sap, her breasts, her mouth, her vasa inferiora bud with blossom, become fragrant, cool, and nectariphorous. At year’s end, the wizard would have his way with her, bedding her once amid his alembics and grimoires, ere despatching her as gift to some apprentice in king’s service or the king himself.Théophile Gautier, «Omphale» (1833).
The wizard is dead now, his seed-magick forgotten, but here and there his anthetaira linger vegetably, some maintained for nostalgia’s sake by royal heirs, others, expelled, employed in lupanars of the lower grades, for their fragrance is faded, their nectars thinned, and they are feeble now in their venery who once clasped and coupled with hederal puissance, with convolvular ingenuity. And a few have returned to the wizard’s ruins, escaped from palace or lupanar, and have set root there to dream and dwindle daily in a chosen and cherished shade.