As one read them, one seemed to be floating down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. The mere lines looked to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one pushes out to the Lido. The sudden flashes of colour reminded him of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall honeycombed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through the dim, dust-stained arcades. Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he kept saying over and over to himself: –
"Devant une façade rose,
Sur le marbre d’un escalier."
The whole of Venice was in those two lines.
– Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 14. While he waits for scientist Alan Campbell, Dorian reads some stanzas about Venice from a book of French poetry. The two lines quoted translate as "Upon a red-faced town On the marble of a stairway." They transport Dorian back to Italy’s floating city, which he had visited with Basil. A beautiful simile is used to compare the lines of the poem to the "straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one pushes out to the Lido." There is a dark irony in the images of beauty and peace conjured up by Dorian in this passage, as they mask Dorian’s darker nefarious thoughts – to have Campbell dispose of Basil Hallward’s body after his grisly murder by Dorian. When Campbell refuses Dorian uses blackmail to force him to carry out his dirty work.