side
of these audacious outfits, blond Fantine's canezou, with its
transparencies, its indiscretion, and its reticence, concealing and
displaying at one and the same time, seemed an alluring godsend of
decency, and the famous Court of Love, presided over by the Vicomtesse
de Cette, with the sea-green eyes, would, perhaps, have awarded the
prize for coquetry to this canezou, in the contest for the prize of
modesty. The most ingenious is, at times, the wisest. This does happen.

Brilliant of face, delicate of profile, with eyes of a deep blue, heavy
lids, feet arched and small, wrists and ankles admirably formed, a white
skin which, here and there allowed the azure branching of the veins to
be seen, joy, a cheek that was young and fresh, the robust throat of the
Juno of AEgina, a strong and supple nape of the neck, shoulders modelled
as though by Coustou, with a voluptuous dimple in the middle, visible
through the muslin; a gayety cooled by dreaminess; sculptural and
exquisite--such was Fantine; and beneath these feminine adornments and
these ribbons one could divine a statue, and in that statue a soul.

Fantine was beautiful, without being too conscious of it. Those rare
dreamers, mysterious priests of the beautiful who silently confront
everything with perfection, would have caught a glimpse in this little
working-woman, through the transparency of her Parisian grace, of the
ancient sacred euphony. This daughter of the shadows was thoroughbred.
She was beautiful in the two ways--style and rhythm. Style is the form
of the ideal; rhythm is its movement.

We have said that Fantine was joy; she was also modesty.

To an observer who studied her attentively, that which breathed from
her athwart all the intoxication of her age, the season, and her
love affair, was an invincible expression of reserve and modesty. She
remained a little astonished. This chaste astonishment is the shade
of difference which separates Psyche from Venus. Fantine had the long,
white, fine fingers of the vestal virgin who stirs the ashes of the
sacred fire with a golden pin. Although she would have refused nothing
to Tholomyes, as we shall have more than ample opportunity to see, her
face in repose was supremely virginal; a sort of serious and almost
austere dignity suddenly overwhelmed her at certain times, and there
was nothing more singular and disturbing than to see gayety become so
suddenly extinct there, and meditation succeed to cheerfulness