ulty that holds me back invincible?"

As I uttered the preceding words, I noticed that, under the sway of the
grief which dictated them, my shoulders were strangely lifted up, and,
as then I found myself in the attitude which I had previously tried to
render natural, the unexpected movement of my shoulders, joined to that
attitude, suddenly impressed it with an expression of life so just, so
true, so surprising, that I was overwhelmed.

Thus I gained possession of an aesthetic fact of the first rank, and I
was as amazed at my discovery as I was surprised that I had not observed
sooner a self-evident movement, whose powerful and expressive character
seems fundamentally connected with the actions of the head. "How stupid
I am," I thought, "not to have remarked so evident an action of an agent
which leads the head itself. How could I let this movement of the
shoulder escape me!" And I revelled in the pleasurable triumph of
reproducing and contemplating expressions which I could not have
rendered previously without dishonoring them. Thenceforth I understood
without a doubt all the importance of this latest discovery. But this
importance, clearly proven as it was, was not yet fully explained to me.

Thus, I knew henceforth the necessity for movements of the shoulder, but
I was still ignorant of their motive cause; and I was reluctant to be
longer ignorant. I foresaw a concomitance of relations between this
movement of the shoulder and the expression of the head.

The shoulder, then, became, in its turn, the chief object of my
studies, and I gained therefrom clear and indisputable principles.

In this way I managed to form the bases of my discovery. The mothers
whom I had seen bending their heads over the children on whom they
gazed, thus revealed something unreserved and touching; and in my
ignorance the important part which the shoulder played in the attitude
had escaped me. It was indeed from the action of the shoulder, even more
than from the inclination of the head, that this expression of
tenderness, so touching to behold, proceeded.

The head, in such a case, accordingly receives its greatest sum of
expression from the shoulder. That is a fact to be noted.

For instance, let a head--however loving we may suppose it to be
intrinsically--bend toward the object of its contemplation, and let the
shoulder not be lifted, that head will plainly lack an air of vitality
and warm sincerity without which it cannot persuade