rrounded her. She was, at the moment when this history
begins, almost exactly what she was in 1817. Eighteen years had passed
over her head and respected it. At forty she might have been thought no
more than twenty-five.

Therefore to describe her in 1836 is to picture her as she was in 1817.
Women who know the conditions of temperament and happiness in which a
woman should live to resist the ravages of time will understand how and
why Felicite des Touches enjoyed this great privilege as they study
a portrait for which were reserved the brightest tints of Nature's
palette, and the richest setting.

Brittany presents a curious problem to be solved in the predominance
of dark hair, brown eyes, and swarthy complexions in a region so near
England that the atmospheric effects are almost identical. Does this
problem belong to the great question of races? to hitherto unobserved
physical influences? Science may some day find the reason of this
peculiarity, which ceases in the adjoining province of Normandy. Waiting
its solution, this odd fact is there before our eyes; fair complexions
are rare in Brittany, where the women's eyes are as black and lively as
those of Southern women; but instead of possessing the tall figures and
swaying lines of Italy and Spain, they are usually short, close-knit,
well set-up and firm, except in the higher classes which are crossed by
their alliances.

Mademoiselle des Touches, a true Breton, is of medium height, though
she looks taller than she really is. This effect is produced by the
character of her face, which gives height to her form. She has that
skin, olive by day and dazzling by candlelight, which distinguishes a
beautiful Italian; you might, if you pleased, call it animated ivory.
The light glides along a skin of that texture as on a polished surface;
it shines; a violent emotion is necessary to bring the faintest color
to the centre of the cheeks, where it goes away almost immediately. This
peculiarity gives to her face the calm impassibility of the savage. The
face, more long than oval, resembles that of some beautiful Isis in
the Egyptian bas-reliefs; it has the purity of the heads of sphinxes,
polished by the fire of the desert, kissed by a Coptic sun. The tones
of the skin are in harmony with the faultless modelling of the head. The
black and abundant hair descends in heavy masses beside the throat, like
the coif of the statues at Memphis, and carries out magnificently the
genera