Sophie Grignoult, who, following the usual custom of taking a stage name, was known as Florine, had made her debut, beautiful as she was, in a subordinate capacity. Her triumph and her wealth she owed to Raoul Nathan. The association of these two careers, common enough in the dramatic and literary world, did not injure Raoul, who, in his character as a man of high pretensions, respected the proprieties. Nevertheless, Florine’s fortune was far from assured. Her professional income, arising from her salary and what she could earn in her holidays, barely sufficed for dress and housekeeping. Nathan helped her with contributions levied on new ventures in trade, and was always chivalrous and ready to act as her protector; but the support he gave was neither regular nor solid. This instability, this hand-to-mouth life, had no terrors for Florine. She believed in her talent and her beauty; and this robust faith had something comic in it for those who heard her, in answer to remonstrances, mortgaging her future on such security.
“I can live on my means whenever I like,” she would say. “I have fifty francs in the funds now.”
No one could understand how, with her beauty, Florine had remained seven years in obscurity; but as a matter of fact, she was enrolled as a supernumerary at the age of thirteen, and made her debut two years later in a humble theatre on the boulevards. At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman. She was now twenty-eight, an age which with French women is the culminating point of their beauty. Painters admired most of all her shoulders, glossy white, with olive tints about the back of the neck, but firm and polished, reflecting the light like watered silk. When she turned her head, the neck made magnificent curves in which sculptors delighted. On this neck rose the small, imperious head of a Roman empress, graceful and finely moulded, round and self-assertive, like that of Poppaea. The features were correct, yet expressive, and the unlined forehead was that of an easygoing woman who takes all trouble lightly, yet can be obstinate as a mule on occasion and deaf to all reason. This forehead, with its pure unbroken sweep, gave value to the lovely flaxen hair, generally raised in front, in Roman fashion, in two equal masses and twisted into a high knot at the back, so as to prolong the curve of the neck and bring out its whiteness. Dark, delicate eyebrows, such as a Chinese artist pencils, framed the heavy lids, covered with a network of tiny pink veins. The pupils, sparkling with fire but spotted with patches of brown, gave to her look the fierce fixity of a wild beast, emblematic of the courtesan’s cold heartlessness. The lovely gazelle-like iris was a beautiful gray, and fringed with black lashes, a bewitching contrast which brought out yet more strikingly the expression of calm and expectant desire. Darker tints encircled the eyes; but it was the artistic finish with which she used them that was most remarkable. Those darting, sidelong glances which nothing escaped, the upward gaze of her dreamy pose, the way she had of keeping the iris fixed, while charging it with the most intense passion and without moving the head or stirring a muscle of the face—a trick, this, learned on the stage—the keen sweep which would embrace a whole room to find out the man she wanted—these were the arts which made of her eyes the most terrible, the sweetest, the strangest in the world.
Rouge had spoiled the delicate transparency of her soft cheeks. But if it was beyond her power to blush or grow pale, she had a slender nose, indented by pink, quivering nostrils, which seemed to breathe the sarcasm and mockery of Molière’s waiting-maids. Her mouth, sensual and luxurious, lending itself to irony as readily as to love, owed much of its beauty to the finely-cut edges of the little groove joining the upper lip to the nose. Her white, rather fleshy, chin portended storms in love. Her hands and arms might have been an empress’. But the feet were short and thick, ineradicable sign of low birth. Never had heritage wrought more woe. In her efforts to change it, Florine had stopped short only at amputation. But her feet were obstinate, like the Bretons from whom she sprang, and refused to yield to any science or manipulation. Florine therefore wore long boots, stuffed with cotton, to give her an arched instep. She was of medium height, and threatened with corpulence, but her figure still kept its curves and precision.
Morally, she was past mistress in all the airs and graces, tantrums, quips, and caresses of her trade; but she gave them a special character by affecting childishness and edging in a sly thrust under cover of innocent laughter. With all her apparent ignorance and giddiness, she was at home in the mysteries of discount and commercial law. She had waded through so many bad times to reach her day of precarious triumph! She had descended, story by story, to the ground-floor, through such a coil of intrigue! She knew life under so many forms; from that which dines off bread and cheese to that which toys listlessly with apricot fritters; from that which does its cooking and washing in the corner of a garret with an earthen stove to that which summons its vassal host of big-paunched chefs and impudent scullions. She had indulged in credit without killing it.
