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r her all the way from Marseille. She alighted in a terrible state of prostration, exhausted and bewildered by her long railroad journey, the first in her life, for she had been taken to Tunis as a child and had never left it. Two negroes carried her from the carriage to her apartments in an armchair, which was always kept in the vestibule thereafter, ready for that difficult transportation. Madame Jansoulet could not walk upstairs, for it made her dizzy; she would not have an elevator because her weight made it squeak; besides, she never walked. An enormous creature, so bloated that it was impossible to assign her an age, but somewhere between twenty-five and forty, with rather a pretty face, but features all deformed by fat, lifeless eyes beneath drooping lids grooved like shells, trussed up in exported gowns, loaded with diamonds and jewels like a Hindoo idol, she was a most perfect specimen of the transplanted Europeans who are called Levantines. A strange race of obese Creoles, connected with our society by naught save language and dress, but enveloped by the Orient in its stupefying atmosphere, the subtle poisons of its opium-laden air, in which everything becomes limp and nerveless, from the tissues of the skin to the girdle around the waist, ay, even to the mind itself and the thought. She was the daughter of an enormously wealthy Belgian, a dealer in coral at Tunis, in whose establishment Jansoulet had been employed for several months on his first arrival in the country. Mademoiselle Afchin, at that time a fascinating doll, with dazzling complexion and hair, and perfect health, came often to the counting-room for her father, in the great chariot drawn by mules which conveyed them to their beautiful villa of La Marse in the outskirts of Tunis. The child, always _decollete_, with gleaming white shoulders seen for a moment in a luxurious frame, dazzled the adventurer; and years after, when he had become rich, the favorite of the bey, and thought of settling down, his mind reverted to her. The child had changed into a stout, heavy, sallow girl. Her intellect, never of a high order, had become still more obtuse in the torpor of such a life as dormice lead, in the neglect of a father whose whole time and thought were given to business, and in the use of tobacco saturated with opium and of sweetmeats,--the torpor of her Flemish blood conjoined with Oriental indolence; and with all the rest, ill-bred, gluttonous, se
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