The Countess’ inattention to me allowed me to study her. My eyes feasted as they gazed at the lovely speaker; they embraced her form, kissed her feet, played with the ringlets of her hair. And all the time I was a prey to the terror which only those can understand who have, in the course of their lives, known the immeasurable joys of a genuine passion. I was afraid lest she should detect my gaze fixed on the spot between her shoulders which I had kissed so ardently. My fear whetted the temptation, and I yielded to it. I looked, my eye rent the stuff of her dress, and I saw a mole that marked the top of the pretty line between her shoulders, a speck lying on milk; this, ever since the ball, had blazed out of the darkness in which the sleep of youths seems to float when their imagination is ardent and their life chaste.
I can sketch for you the principal features which would everywhere have attracted attention to the Countess; but the most exact drawing, the warmest glow of color, would express nothing of it. Her face is one of those of which no one could give a true portrait but the impossible artist whose hand can paint the glow of inward fires, and render the luminous essence which science denies, which language has no word for, but which a lover sees. Her mass of fine fair hair often gave her headaches, caused no doubt by a sudden rush of blood to the head. Her rounded forehead, prominent like that of La Gioconda, seemed to be full of unspoken ideas, of suppressed feelings—flowers drowned in bitter waters. Her eyes were greenish, with spots of hazel, and always pale in color; but when her children were concerned, or if she were betrayed into any vehement emotion of joy or grief, rare in the life of a resigned wife, her eye could flash with a subtle flame, which seemed to have derived its fire from the deepest springs of life, and which would no doubt dry them up; a lightning gleam that has wrung tears from me when she shed on me her terrible disdain, and that she found adequate to abash the boldest gaze.
A Greek nose that Phidias might have chiseled, joined by a double curve to lips of exquisite shape, gave strength to her oval face, and her complexion, like a camellia-petal, was charmingly tinted with tender rose in the cheeks. She was not thin, but this did not detract from the grace of her figure, nor from the roundness that made every outline beautiful, though fully developed. You will at once understand the character of this perfection when I tell you that at the junction with the upper arm of the dazzling bosom that had bewitched me, there could be no roll nor wrinkle. Her throat, where her head was set on, showed none of those hollows that make some women’s necks look like tree-trunks; the muscles showed no cords, and every line was curved with a grace as distracting to the eye as to the painter’s brush. A delicate down died away on her cheeks, and on the back of her neck, catching the light with a silky sheen. Her ears were small and shapely—the ears of a slave and of a mother, she used to say. Later, when I dwelt in her heart, she would say, “Here comes Monsieur de Mortsauf,” and be quite right, when I could as yet hear nothing—I, whose hearing is remarkably keen. Her arms were beautiful; her hands, with their turned-up fingertips, were long, and the nails set into the flesh as in antique statues.
I should offend you by attributing greater beauty to a flat figure than to a full one, but that you are an exception. A round figure is a sign of strength; but women who are built so are imperious, wilful, and voluptuous rather than tender. Women who are flatly formed are, on the contrary, self-sacrificing, full of refinement, and inclined to melancholy; they are more thoroughly women. A flat figure is soft and supple; a full one is rigid and jealous. Now you know the kind of shape she had. She had the foot of a lady; a foot that walks little, is easily tired, and is engaging to look upon when it peeps from under the petticoat.
Though she was the mother of two children, I have never met with any woman more genuinely maidenly. Her expression was so girlish, and at the same time amazed and dreamy, that it brought the eye back to gaze, as a painter invites it back to a face in which his genius has embodied a world of feelings. Her visible qualities indeed can only be expressed by comparisons. Do you remember the wild, austere fragrance of a heath we plucked on our way home from the Villa Diodati, a flower you admired so much for its coloring of pink and black—then you will understand how this woman could be elegant enough so far from the world, natural in her expressions, refining all that came to behold her—pink and black. Her frame had the green tenderness we admire in leaves but just opened, her mind had the intense concentration of a savage’s, she was a child in feeling sobered by grief, the mistress of the house, and an unwedded soul.
She was charming without artifice in her way of sitting down, of rising, of being silent, or of throwing out a remark. Habitually reserved, and vigilant as the sentinel on whom the safety of all depends, ever on the watch for disaster, she sometimes smiled in a way that betrayed a laughing spirit buried under the
