air; but no head dropped on the wooden floor with a dull thud, no awful stream of blood gushed forth. Instead of a head there fell on the mat a marvelously beautiful camellia-blossom, the like of which no one had ever seen before.
And the Painter of Camellias understood that Tsubaki-San had been no daughter of man, but the embodied soul of the flower he loved above all others, to whom he had consecrated his life and his art, and whom finally he had wished to betray, spellbound as he was with the vanity and emptiness of wordly fame.
Satiated with the world and its illusions, he shaved his head and entered a Budhistic monastery so that secluded from the tumult of life he could end his life in memories of her whom he loved, whom his love had called into being and his treachery had condemned to death.
***
Not a single picture by the Painter of Camellias is extant: indeed, not a single one survived the sad fate of his sweetheart, for at the instant when the sword struck the neck of Tsubaki-San, all the camellia blossoms he had ever painted fell off their stems, not petal by petal, as camellias had done up to that time after the manner of roses, but as a whole . . . like a severed head falling to the ground . . . The name and fame of the Painter of Camellias were soon obliterated, and the camellia became a flower almost unknown in art, except in the Korin school. From that time to this day, however, wilted camellias do not drop off petal by petal, but each flower falls intact to the ground. And therefore the Japanese people to this day have a sort of superstitious dread of this flower, even though they admire it; it reminds them of heads condemned to the sword. However, this legend fell into oblivion, and had it not been revealed to me once in a dream, probably nobody ever would have been able to disclose to the world this touching and instructive incident of the Painter of Camellias and his sweetheart, beautiful Tsubaki-San. For not even in Japan does anyone know this legend.
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