Accustomed to control her own life, Felicite soon familiarized herself with the ways of thought and action which are held to be exclusively the province of man.  In 1816 she was twenty-five years old.  She knew nothing of marriage; her conception of it was wholly that of thought; she judged it in its causes instead of its effect, and saw only its objectionable side.  Her superior mind refused to make the abdication by which a married woman begins that life; she keenly felt the value of independence, and was conscious of disgust for the duties of maternity.

It is necessary to give these details to explain the anomalies presented by the life of Camille Maupin.  She had known neither father nor mother; she had been her own mistress from childhood; her guardian was an old archaeologist.  Chance had flung her into the regions of knowledge and of imagination, into the world of literature, instead of holding her within the rigid circle defined by the futile education given to women, and by maternal instructions as to dress, hypocritical propriety, and the hunting graces of their sex.  Thus, long before she became celebrated, a glance might have told an observer that she had never played with dolls.

Toward the close of the year 1817 Felicite des Touches began to perceive, not the fading of her beauty, but the beginning of a certain lassitude of body.  She saw that a change would presently take place in her person as the result of her obstinate celibacy.  She wanted to retain her youth and beauty, to which at that time she clung.  Science warned her of the sentence pronounced by Nature upon all her creations, which perish as much by the misconception of her laws as by the abuse of them.  The macerated face of her aunt returned to her memory and made her shudder.  Placed between marriage and love, her desire was to keep her freedom; but she was now no longer indifferent to homage and the admiration that surrounded her.  She was, at the moment when this history begins, almost exactly what she was in 1817.  Eighteen years had passed over her head and respected it.  At forty she might have been thought no more than twenty-five.

Therefore to describe her in 1836 is to picture her as she was in 1817.  Women who know the conditions of temperament and happiness in which a woman should live to resist the ravages of time will understand how and why Felicite des Touches enjoyed this great privilege as they study a portrait for which were reserved the brightest tints of Nature’s palette, and the richest setting.

Brittany presents a curious problem to be solved in the predominance of dark hair, brown eyes, and swarthy complexions in a region so near England that the atmospheric effects are almost identical.  Does this problem belong to the great question of races? to hitherto unobserved physical influences?  Science may some day find the reason of this peculiarity, which ceases in the adjoining province of Normandy.  Waiting its solution, this odd fact is there before our eyes; fair complexions are rare in Brittany, where the women’s eyes are as black and lively as those of Southern women; but instead of possessing the tall figures and swaying lines of Italy and Spain, they are usually short, close-knit, well set-up and firm, except in the higher classes which are crossed by their alliances.