"Silhouette"
At a distant horizon my mind drifts away
cascading shadows follow me everywhere
even in my dreams where your silhouette haunts me
your smile still lingers, those eyes that seem to tell me I should stay
In the afterglow, I can still see traces of splendid moments we had
Cut short by destiny as hearts kept distance with words which remained untold.
Your sultry silhouette haunts my every breath
Succumbing to love's call even if it will be against all odds
There is something about the way you make this heart quiver
Always bringing me back to you no matter how far I roam.
That wicked silhouette framing a broken soul
Pierced my deepest core the moment I had to let you go
But only time and destiny can foretell if ever this yearning will lead me back to you once more…
cascading shadows follow me everywhere
even in my dreams where your silhouette haunts me
your smile still lingers, those eyes that seem to tell me I should stay
In the afterglow, I can still see traces of splendid moments we had
Cut short by destiny as hearts kept distance with words which remained untold.
Your sultry silhouette haunts my every breath
Succumbing to love's call even if it will be against all odds
There is something about the way you make this heart quiver
Always bringing me back to you no matter how far I roam.
That wicked silhouette framing a broken soul
Pierced my deepest core the moment I had to let you go
But only time and destiny can foretell if ever this yearning will lead me back to you once more…
Beach Silhouette -- Ivan Pili
Étienne de Silhouette was the contrôleur général des finances in 1759 who was tasked with curbing France's deficit and strengthening its finances during the Seven Years' War against the UK. Expecting a bleak budget for 1760 (an income of 286 million livres against expenses of 503 million livres, including at least 94 million in debt service), while unable to tax the nobility or church, he imposed the "general subvention," (taxes on external signs of wealth such as doors and windows, farms, luxury goods, servants, and profits). He also managed to curtail the royal household expenditure, revise state pensions, and encourage free trade by reducing some taxes while establishing new ones. His austerity programs led the term “à la Silhouette” to be applied to anything made cheaply, especially the shadow “profiles” or “shades” cut from black paper that were in vogue. Less than nine months after taking office he was removed, and in his retirement he became a clever amateur cutter himself. The physionotrace apparatus invented by Gilles-Louis Chrétien in 1783-84 facilitated the production of silhouette portraits by deploying the mechanics of the pantograph to transmit the tracing (via an eyepiece) of the subject's profile silhouette to a needle moving on an engraving plate, from which multiple portrait copies could be printed. August Edouart introduced the term to English after 1814, though he admitted that he was often “regarded with looks as black as the paper of which I made the likenesses.”
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