ve found the lines of the thick eyebrows, which almost met, a
little hard; or found a fault in the almost invisible down that covered
her features. I saw the signs of passion everywhere, written on those
Italian eyelids, on the splendid shoulders worthy of the Venus of Milo,
on her features, in the darker shade of down above a somewhat thick
under-lip. She was not merely a woman, but a romance. The whole
blended harmony of lines, the feminine luxuriance of her frame, and its
passionate promise, were subdued by a constant inexplicable reserve
and modesty at variance with everything else about her. It needed an
observation as keen as my own to detect such signs as these in her
character. To explain myself more clearly; there were two women in
Foedora, divided perhaps by the line between head and body: the one,
the head alone, seemed to be susceptible, and the other phlegmatic.
She prepared her glance before she looked at you, something unspeakably
mysterious, some inward convulsion seemed revealed by her glittering
eyes.

"So, to be brief, either my imperfect moral science had left me a good
deal to learn in the moral world, or a lofty soul dwelt in the countess,
lent to her face those charms that fascinated and subdued us, and gave
her an ascendency only the more complete because it comprehended a
sympathy of desire.

"I went away completely enraptured with this woman, dazzled by the
luxury around her, gratified in every faculty of my soul--noble and
base, good and evil. When I felt myself so excited, eager, and elated,
I thought I understood the attraction that drew thither those artists,
diplomatists, men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple
brass. They came, no doubt, to find in her society the delirious emotion
that now thrilled through every fibre in me, throbbing through my brain,
setting the blood a-tingle in every vein, fretting even the tiniest
nerve. And she had given herself to none, so as to keep them all. A
woman is a coquette so long as she knows not love.

"'Well,' I said to Rastignac, 'they married her, or sold her perhaps,
to some old man, and recollections of her first marriage have caused her
aversion for love.'

"I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honore, where Foedora lived.
Almost all the breadth of Paris lies between her mansion and the Rue des
Cordiers, but the distance seemed short, in spite of the cold. And I was
to lay siege to Foedora's heart, in winter, and a bitter winter, w