"The Mask", Chapter 1, from "The King in Yellow" by Robert W. Chambers

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Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene 2.

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Look at that - the book I'm reading from has footnotes for things the reader may not be familiar with. For example:

Mahl stick: A stick with a padded tip, used to support a painter's hand holding a paintbrush.

For the bit about the "Sanctus in Gounod's Mass", there is a footnote:

Charles Gounod, the French composer, wrote "St. Cecilia Mass" in 1855. The "Sanctus" is the fourth movement.

Boris Yvain is mentioned in passing in "The Repairer of Reputations", the first story in "The King in Yellow".

The bit about fossilization is also covered in Lovecraft's story "The Man of Stone".

The pictures used is a photo of a lilium longiflorum, commonly known as an Easter Lily taken by Matt H. Wade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MattWade and https://twitter.com/thatmattwade) used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en).

To follow along: https://gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492-h/8492-h.htm#THE_MASK