“Béatrix is one of those fair women by whom fair Eve would look like a Negress. She is as tall and straight as a taper, and as white as the holy wafer; she has a long, pointed face, and a very variable complexion, today as colorless as cambric, tomorrow dull and mottled under the skin with a myriad tiny specks, as though the blood had left dust there in the course of the night. Her forehead is grand, but a little too bold; her eyes, pale aquamarine-tinted, floating in the white cornea under colorless eyebrows and indolent lids. There is often a dark circle round her eyes. Her nose, curved to a quarter of a circle, is pinched at the nostrils and full of refinement, but it is impertinent. She has the Austrian mouth, the upper lip thicker than the lower, which has a scornful droop. Her pale cheeks only flush under some very strong emotion. Her chin is rather fat; mine is not thin; and perhaps I ought not to tell you that women with a fat chin are exacting in love affairs. She has one of the most beautiful figures I ever saw; a back of dazzling whiteness, which used to be very flat, but which now, I am told, has filled out and grown dimpled; but the bust is not so fine as the shoulders, her arms are still thin. However, she has a mien and a freedom of manner which redeem all her defects and throw her beauties into relief. Nature has bestowed on her that air, as of a princess, which can never be acquired, which becomes her, and at once reveals the woman of birth; it is in harmony with the slender hips of exquisite form, with the prettiest foot in the world, and the abundant angel-like hair, resembling waves of light, such as Girodet’s brush has so often painted.
“Without being faultlessly beautiful or pretty, when she chooses, she can make an indelible impression. She has only to dress in cherry-colored velvet, with lace frillings, and red roses in her hair, to be divine. If on any pretext Béatrix could dress in the costume of a time when women wore pointed stomachers laced with ribbon, rising, slender and fragile-looking, from the padded fullness of brocade skirts set in thick, deep pleats; when their heads were framed in starched ruffs, and their arms hidden under slashed sleeves with lace ruffles, out of which the hand appeared like the pistil from the cup of a flower; when their hair was tossed back in a thousand little curls over a knot held up by a network of jewels, Béatrix would appear as a successful rival to any of the ideal beauties you may see in that array.”
Félicité showed Calyste a good copy of Mieris’ picture, in which a lady in white satin stands singing with a gentleman of Brabant, while a Negro pours old Spanish wine into a glass with a foot, and a housekeeper is arranging some biscuits.
“Fair women,” she went on, “have the advantage over us dark women of the most delightful variety; you may be fair in a hundred ways, but there is only one way of being dark. Fair women are more womanly than we are; we dark Frenchwomen are too like men. Well,” she added, “do not be falling in love with Béatrix on the strength of the portrait I have given you, exactly like some prince in the Arabian Nights. Too late in the day, my dear boy! But be comforted. With her the bones are for the first comer.”
She spoke with meaning; the admiration expressed in the youth’s face was evidently more for the picture than for the painter whose touch had missed its purpose.
“In spite of her being a blonde,” she resumed, “Béatrix has not the delicacy of her coloring; the lines are severe, she is elegant and hard; she has the look of a strictly accurate drawing, and you might fancy she had southern fires in her soul. She is a flaming angel, slowly drying up. Her eyes look thirsty. Her front face is the best; in profile her face looks as if it had been flattened between two doors. You will see if I am wrong.
“This is what led to our being such intimate friends: For three years, from 1828 to 1831, Béatrix, while enjoying the last gaieties of the Restoration, wandering through drawing-rooms, going to court, gracing the fancy-dress balls at the Élysée Bourbon, was judging men, things, and events from the heights of her intellect. Her mind was fully occupied. This first bewilderment at seeing the world kept her heart dormant, and it remained torpid under the first startling experiences of marriage—a baby—a confinement, and all the business of motherhood, which I cannot bear; I am not a woman so far as that is concerned. To me children are unendurable; they bring a thousand sorrows and incessant anxieties. I must say that I regard it as
