French.

"That is very fine!" said Esther, when she had repeated these two grand
and universal utterances of the Catholic faith without making a mistake.

"What is your name?" she asked the priest when he took leave of her.

"Carlos Herrera; I am a Spaniard banished from my country."

Esther took his hand and kissed it. She was no longer the courtesan; she
was an angel rising after a fall.

In a religious institution, famous for the aristocratic and pious
teaching imparted there, one Monday morning in the beginning of March
1824 the pupils found their pretty flock increased by a newcomer, whose
beauty triumphed without dispute not only over that of her companions,
but over the special details of beauty which were found severally in
perfection in each one of them. In France it is extremely rare, not to
say impossible, to meet with the thirty points of perfection, described
in Persian verse, and engraved, it is said, in the Seraglio, which are
needed to make a woman absolutely beautiful. Though in France the whole
is seldom seen, we find exquisite parts. As to that imposing union which
sculpture tries to produce, and has produced in a few rare examples like
the Diana and the Callipyge, it is the privileged possession of Greece
and Asia Minor.

Esther came from that cradle of the human race; her mother was a Jewess.
The Jews, though so often deteriorated by their contact with other
nations, have, among their many races, families in which this sublime
type of Asiatic beauty has been preserved. When they are not repulsively
hideous, they present the splendid characteristics of Armenian beauty.
Esther would have carried off the prize at the Seraglio; she had the
thirty points harmoniously combined. Far from having damaged the finish
of her modeling and the freshness of her flesh, her strange life had
given her the mysterious charm of womanhood; it is no longer the close,
waxy texture of green fruit and not yet the warm glow of maturity; there
is still the scent of the flower. A few days longer spent in dissolute
living, and she would have been too fat. This abundant health, this
perfection of the animal in a being in whom voluptuousness took
the place of thought, must be a remarkable fact in the eyes of
physiologists. A circumstance so rare, that it may be called impossible
in very young girls, was that her hands, incomparably fine in shape,
were as soft, transparent, and white as those of a woman after the birth
o