reign
clothes, laden with diamonds and jewels after the fashion of a Hindu
idol, she was as fine a sample as could be found of those transplanted
European women called Levantines--a curious race of obese creoles whom
speech and costume alone attach to our world, but whom the East wraps
round with its stupefying atmosphere, with the subtle poisons of its
drugged air in which everything, from the tissues of the skin to the
waists of garments, even to the soul, is enervated and relaxed.

This particular specimen of it was the daughter of an immensely rich
Belgian who was engaged in the coral trade at Tunis, and in whose
business Jansoulet, after his arrival in the country, had been employed
for some months. Mlle. Afchin, in those days a delicious little doll of
twelve years old, with radiant complexion, hair, and health, used often
to come to fetch her father from the counting-house in the great chariot
with its yoke of mules which carried them to their fine villa at La
Marsu, in the vicinity of Tunis. This mischievous child with splendid
bare shoulders, had dazzled the adventurer as he caught glimpses of
her amid her luxurious surroundings, and, years afterward, when, having
become rich and the favourite of the Bey, he began to think of settling
down, it was to her that his thoughts went. The child had grown into a
fat young woman, heavy and white. Her intelligence, dull in the first
instance, had become still more obscured through the inertia of a
dormouse's existence, the carelessness of a father given over to
business, the use of opium-saturated tobacco and of preserves made from
rose-leaves, the torpor of her Flemish blood, re-enforced by Oriental
indolence. Furthermore, she was ill-bred, gluttonous, sensual, arrogant,
a Levantine jewel in perfection.

But Jansoulet saw nothing of all this.

For him she was, and remained, up to the time of her arrival in Paris, a
superior creature, a lady of the most exalted rank, a Demoiselle Afchin.
He addressed her with respect, in her presence maintained an attitude
which was a little constrained and timid, gave her money without
counting, satisfied her most costly fantasies, her wildest caprices, all
the strange desires of a Levantine's brain disordered through boredom
and idleness. One word alone excused everything. She was a Demoiselle
Afchin. Beyond this, no intercourse between them; he always at the
Kasbah or the Bardo, courting the favour of the Bey, or else in his
counti