lorgnette

He held a pair of tortoiseshell lorgnette glasses to his eyes, to get a better look at the flames climbing the building’s walls.

A lyrical aesthete and a Flaubertian prose polisher, he is pictured, in “Lucky Per,” as the sickly poet Enevoldsen, fussing with his lorgnette at a Copenhagen café while worrying about “where to put a comma.”

One hand carried a gigantic bag, the kind that holds passports, engagement diaries, and bridge scores, while the other hand toyed with that inevitable lorgnette, the enemy to other people’s privacy.

And, like a Brontë sister in a box at the opera, Perry observes the drama from an omniscient perch, examining her characters as if through a lorgnette.

People lost things then that we don’t lose now, simply because we don’t use them: lorgnettes, pince-nez spectacles, chatelaine bags, fox tails, feather boas, auto starter cranks, pocket watches, watch fobs, watch keys .