of a Roman empress, the delicate, round,
and self-willed head of Pompeia, with features of elegant correctness,
and the smooth forehead of a woman who drives all care away and all
reflection, who yields easily, but is capable of balking like a mule,
and incapable at such times of listening to reason. That forehead,
turned, as it were, with one cut of the chisel, brought out the beauty
of the golden hair, which was raised in front, after the Roman fashion,
in two equal masses, and twisted up behind the head to prolong the line
of the neck, and enhance that whiteness by its beautiful color. Black
and delicate eyebrows, drawn by a Chinese brush, encircled the soft
eyelids, which were threaded with rosy fibres. The pupils of the eyes,
extremely bright, though striped with brown rays, gave to her glance the
cruel fixity of a beast of prey, and betrayed the cold maliciousness
of the courtesan. The eyes were gray, fringed with black lashes,--a
charming contrast, which made their expression of calm and contemplative
voluptuousness the more observable; the circle round the eyes showed
marks of fatigue, but the artistic manner in which she could turn
her eyeballs, right and left, or up and down, to observe, or seem to
mediate, the way in which she could hold them fixed, casting out their
vivid fire without moving her head, without taking from her face its
absolute immovability (a manoeuvre learned upon the stage), and the
vivacity of their glance, as she looked about a theatre in search of a
friend, made her eyes the most terrible, also the softest, in short, the
most extraordinary eyes in the world. Rouge had destroyed by this
time the diaphanous tints of her cheeks, the flesh of which was still
delicate; but although she could no longer blush or turn pale, she had
a thin nose with rosy, passionate nostrils, made to express irony,--the
mocking irony of Moliere's women-servants. Her sensual mouth, expressive
of sarcasm and love of dissipation, was adorned with a deep furrow that
united the upper lip with the nose. Her chin, white and rather fat,
betrayed the violence of passion. Her hands and arms were worthy of a
sovereign.

But she had one ineradicable sign of low birth,--her foot was short
and fat. No inherited quality ever caused greater distress. Florine had
tried everything, short of amputation, to get rid of it. The feet were
obstinate, like the Breton race from which she came; they resisted all
treatment. Florine now wore