Ah!....

"At first he conceived the preposterous notion of an unhappy passion,
and gyrated for a while about his fair cousin, Mme. d'Aiglemont,
not perceiving that she had already danced the waltz in Faust with
a diplomatist. The year '25 went by, spent in tentatives, in futile
flirtations, and an unsuccessful quest. The loving object of which he
was in search did not appear. Passion is extremely rare; and in our
time as many barriers have been raised against passion in social life
as barricades in the streets. In truth, my brothers, the 'improper' is
gaining upon us, I tell you!

"As we may incur reproach for following on the heels of portrait
painters, auctioneers, and fashionable dressmakers, I will not inflict
any description upon you of _her_ in whom Godefroid recognized the
female of his species. Age, nineteen; height, four feet eleven inches;
fair hair, eyebrows _idem_, blue eyes, forehead neither high nor
low, curved nose, little mouth, short turned-up chin, oval face;
distinguishing signs--none. Such was the description on the passport
of the beloved object. You will not ask more than the police, or their
worships the mayors, of all the towns and communes of France, the
gendarmes and the rest of the powers that be? In other respects--I give
you my word for it--she was a rough sketch of a Venus dei Medici.

"The first time that Godefroid went to one of the balls for which Mme.
de Nucingen enjoyed a certain not undeserved reputation, he caught a
glimpse of his future lady-love in a quadrille, and was set marveling
by that height of four feet eleven inches. The fair hair rippled in a
shower of curls about the little girlish head, she looked as fresh as a
naiad peeping out through the crystal pane of her stream to take a look
at the spring flowers. (This is quite in the modern style, strings of
phrases as endless as the macaroni on the table a while ago.) On that
'eyebrows _idem_' (no offence to the prefect of police) Parny, that
writer of light and playful verse, would have hung half-a-dozen
couplets, comparing them very agreeably to Cupid's bow, at the same time
bidding us to observe that the dart was beneath; the said dart,
however, was neither very potent nor very penetrating, for as yet it
was controlled by the namby-pamby sweetness of a Mlle. de la Valliere
as depicted on fire-screens, at the moment when she solemnizes her
betrothal in the sight of heaven, any solemnization before the registrar
being quite