as well as her figure, was
wanting in aesthetic lines, but there was no doubt that, in spite of that,
or perhaps on that very account, she was the most dangerous, infatuating
woman that one could imagine.

She was tall and thin, and there was a certain hardness about her figure,
which became a charm through the vivacity and grace of her movements; her
features harmonized with her figure, for she had a high, clever, cold
forehead, a strong mouth with sensual lips, and an angular, sharp chin,
the effect of which was, however, diminished by her slightly turned-up,
small nose, her beautifully arched eyebrows, and her large, animated,
swimming blue eyes.

In her face, which was almost too full of expression for a woman, there
was as much feeling, kindness and candor as there was calculation,
coolness and deceit, and when she was angry and drew her upper lip up, so
as to show her dazzlingly white teeth, it had even a devilish look of
wickedness and cruelty, and at that time, when women still wore their own
hair, the beauty of her long, chestnut plaits, which she fastened on the
top of her head like a crown, was very striking. Besides this, she was
remarkable for her elegant, tasteful dresses, and a bearing which united
to the dignity of a lady of rank that undefinable something which makes
actresses and women who belong to the higher classes of the _demi-monde_
so interesting to us.

In Paris she would have been taken for a kept woman, but in Vienna the
best drawing-rooms were open to her, and she was not looked upon as more
respectable or as less respectable than any other aristocratic beauties.

Her husband decidedly belonged to that class of men whom that witty
writer, Balzac, so delightfully calls _les hommes predestines_ in his
_Physiologie du Mariage_. Without doubt, he was a very good-looking man,
but he bore that stamp of insignificance which so often conceals
coarseness and vulgarity, and was one of those men who, in the long run,
become unendurable to a woman of refined tastes. He had a good private
income, but his wife understood the art of enjoying life, and so a
deficit in the yearly accounts of the young couple became the rule,
without causing the lively lady to check her noble passion in the least
on that account; she kept horses and carriages, rode with the greatest
boldness, had her box at the opera, and gave beautiful little suppers,
which at that time was the highest aim of a Viennese woman of her class