And he truly liked discovering what ingenious silver match-pairs Babel had provided for the ball. One, certainly devised by Professor Lovell, paired the Chinese four-word idiom 百卉千葩 with the English translation ‘a hundred plants and thousand flowers’. The connotation of the Chinese original, which invoked rich, dazzling, and myriad colours, made the roses redder, the blooming violets larger and more vibrant.
