Mademoiselle des Touches, a true Breton, is of medium height, though she looks taller than she really is.  This effect is produced by the character of her face, which gives height to her form.  She has that skin, olive by day and dazzling by candlelight, which distinguishes a beautiful Italian; you might, if you pleased, call it animated ivory.  The light glides along a skin of that texture as on a polished surface; it shines; a violent emotion is necessary to bring the faintest color to the centre of the cheeks, where it goes away almost immediately.  This peculiarity gives to her face the calm impassibility of the savage.  The face, more long than oval, resembles that of some beautiful Isis in the Egyptian bas-reliefs; it has the purity of the heads of sphinxes, polished by the fire of the desert, kissed by a Coptic sun.  The tones of the skin are in harmony with the faultless modelling of the head.  The black and abundant hair descends in heavy masses beside the throat, like the coif of the statues at Memphis, and carries out magnificently the general severity of form.  The forehead is full, broad, and swelling about the temples, illuminated by surfaces which catch the light, and modelled like the brow of the hunting Diana, a powerful and determined brow, silent and self-contained.  The arch of the eye-brows, vigorously drawn, surmounts a pair of eyes whose flame scintillates at times like that of a fixed star.  The white of the eye is neither bluish, nor strewn with scarlet threads, nor is it purely white; it has the texture of horn, but the tone is warm.  The pupil is surrounded by an orange circle; it is of bronze set in gold, but vivid gold and animated bronze.  This pupil has depth; it is not underlaid, as in certain eyes, by a species of foil, which sends back the light and makes such eyes resemble those of cats or tigers; it has not that terrible inflexibility which makes a sensitive person shudder; but this depth has in it something of the infinite, just as the external radiance of the eyes suggests the absolute.  The glance of an observer may be lost in that soul, which gathers itself up and retires with as much rapidity as it gushed for a second into those velvet eyes.  In moments of passion the eyes of Camille Maupin are sublime; the gold of her glance illuminates them and they flame.  But in repose they are dull; the torpor of meditation often lends them an appearance of stupidity[*]; in like manner, when the glow of the soul is absent the lines of the face are sad.

[*] George Sand says of herself, in “L’Histoire de Ma Vie,” published
    long after the above was written:  “The habit of meditation gave me
    l’air bete (a stupid air).  I say the word frankly, for all my
    life I have been told this, and therefore it must be true.”—­TR.