yes, of a very light blue, borrowed beauty from their lashes, which,
when downcast, threw a shadow on her cheeks. A few freckles marred
the whiteness of her forehead, which was shapely enough. Her face was
exactly like those of Albert Durer's saints, or those of the painters
before Perugino; the same plump, though slender modeling, the same
delicacy saddened by ecstasy, the same severe guilelessness. Everything
about her, even to her attitude, was suggestive of those virgins, whose
beauty is only revealed in its mystical radiance to the eyes of the
studious connoisseur. She had fine hands though red, and a pretty foot,
the foot of an aristocrat.

She habitually wore simple checked cotton dresses; but on Sundays and in
the evening her mother allowed her silk. The cut of her frocks, made at
Besancon, almost made her ugly, while her mother tried to borrow grace,
beauty, and elegance from Paris fashions; for through Monsieur de Soulas
she procured the smallest trifles of her dress from thence. Rosalie had
never worn a pair of silk stockings or thin boots, but always cotton
stockings and leather shoes. On high days she was dressed in a muslin
frock, her hair plainly dressed, and had bronze kid shoes.

This education, and her own modest demeanor, hid in Rosalie a spirit
of iron. Physiologists and profound observers will tell you, perhaps
to your astonishment, that tempers, characteristics, wit, or genius
reappear in families at long intervals, precisely like what are known
as hereditary diseases. Thus talent, like the gout, sometimes skips over
two generations. We have an illustrious example of this phenomenon in
George Sand, in whom are resuscitated the force, the power, and the
imaginative faculty of the Marechal de Saxe, whose natural granddaughter
she is.

The decisive character and romantic daring of the famous Watteville had
reappeared in the soul of his grand-niece, reinforced by the tenacity
and pride of blood of the Rupts. But these qualities--or faults, if
you will have it so--were as deeply buried in this young girlish soul,
apparently so weak and yielding, as the seething lavas within a hill
before it becomes a volcano. Madame de Watteville alone, perhaps,
suspected this inheritance from two strains. She was so severe to her
Rosalie, that she replied one day to the Archbishop, who blamed her for
being too hard on the child, "Leave me to manage her, monseigneur. I
know her! She has more than one Beelzebub in her