paisley & madness

Pola Negri, endangering herself.

Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, [...] in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold!

[...] as the visiter moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies — giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.

--Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia