tales.
Her face told no lies. She had the soul of that glance of fire, the
intellect of those lips made brilliant by the bewitching teeth, the
thought enshrined within that glorious brow, the passion of those
nostrils ready at all moments to snort flame. Therefore love, such as
we imagine it on burning sands, in lonely deserts, filled that heart
of twenty in the breast of a child, doomed, like the snowy heights of
Montenegro, to wear no flowers of the spring.

Observers ought now to understand how it was that La Pechina, from whom
passion issued by every pore, awakened in perverted natures the feelings
deadened by abuse; just as water fills the mouth at sight of those
twisted, blotched, and speckled fruits which gourmands know by
experience, and beneath whose skin nature has put the rarest flavors and
perfumes. Why did Nicolas, that vulgar laborer, pursue this being who
was worthy of a poet, while the eyes of the country-folk pitied her as
a sickly deformity? Why did Rigou, the old man, feel the passion of a
young one for this girl? Which of the two men was young, and which was
old? Was the young peasant as blase as the old usurer? Why did these two
extremes of life meet in one common and devilish caprice? Does the vigor
that draws to its close resemble the vigor that is only dawning? The
moral perversities of men are gulfs guarded by sphinxes; they begin and
end in questions to which there is no answer.

The exclamation, formerly quoted, of the countess, "Piccina!" when
she first saw Genevieve by the roadside, open-mouthed at sight of the
carriage and the elegantly dressed woman within it, will be understood.
This girl, almost a dwarf, of Montenegrin vigor, loved the handsome,
noble bailiff, as children of her age love, when they do love, that is
to say, with childlike passion, with the strength of youth, with the
devotion which in truly virgin souls gives birth to divinest poesy.
Catherine had just swept her coarse hands across the sensitive strings
of that choice harp, strung to the breaking-point. To dance before
Michaud, to shine at the Soulanges ball and inscribe herself on the
memory of that adored master! What glorious thoughts! To fling them into
that volcanic head was like casting live coals upon straw dried in the
August sun.

"No, Catherine," replied La Pechina, "I am ugly and puny; my lot is to
sit in a corner and never to be married, but live alone in the world."

"Men like weaklings," said Catherine.