all, she wore an expression of
implacable determination to be beautiful. This reached the point of
ferocity. She was like a panther, with the power of turning cat at will,
and caressing. One of her eyes was blue, the other black.

Gwynplaine, as well as Ursus, contemplated her.

The Green Box somewhat resembled a phantasmagoria in its
representations. "Chaos Vanquished" was rather a dream than a piece; it
generally produced on the audience the effect of a vision. Now, this
effect was reflected on the actors. The house took the performers by
surprise, and they were thunderstruck in their turn. It was a rebound of
fascination.

The woman watched them, and they watched her.

At the distance at which they were placed, and in that luminous mist
which is the half-light of a theatre, details were lost and it was like
a hallucination. Of course it was a woman, but was it not a chimera as
well? The penetration of her light into their obscurity stupefied them.
It was like the appearance of an unknown planet. It came from a world of
the happy. Her irradiation amplified her figure. The lady was covered
with nocturnal glitterings, like a milky way. Her precious stones were
stars. The diamond brooch was perhaps a pleiad. The splendid beauty of
her bosom seemed supernatural. They felt, as they looked upon the
star-like creature, the momentary but thrilling approach of the regions
of felicity. It was out of the heights of a Paradise that she leant
towards their mean-looking Green Box, and revealed to the gaze of its
wretched audience her expression of inexorable serenity. As she
satisfied her unbounded curiosity, she fed at the same time the
curiosity of the public.

It was the Zenith permitting the Abyss to look at it.

Ursus, Gwynplaine, Vinos, Fibi, the crowd, every one had succumbed to
her dazzling beauty, except Dea, ignorant in her darkness.

An apparition was indeed before them; but none of the ideas usually
evoked by the word were realized in the lady's appearance.

There was nothing about her diaphanous, nothing undecided, nothing
floating, no mist. She was an apparition; rose-coloured and fresh, and
full of health. Yet, under the optical condition in which Ursus and
Gwynplaine were placed, she looked like a vision. There are fleshy
phantoms, called vampires. Such a queen as she, though a spirit to the
crowd, consumes twelve hundred thousand a year, to keep her health.

Behind the lady, in the shadow, her page was t