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