out in a line that unites the head to the shoulders without sinuosity, a most signal characteristic of force.  The neck itself presents at certain moments an athletic magnificence.  The spring of the arms from the shoulders, superb in outline, seems to belong to a colossal woman.  The arms are vigorously modelled, ending in wrists of English delicacy and charming hands, plump, dimpled, and adorned with rosy, almond-shaped nails; these hands are of a whiteness which reveals that the body, so round, so firm, so well set-up, is of another complexion altogether than the face.  The firm, cold carriage of the head is corrected by the mobility of the lips, their changing expression, and the artistic play of the nostrils.

And yet, in spite of all these promises—­hidden, perhaps, from the profane—­the calm of that countenance has something, I know not what, that is vexatious.  More sad, more serious than gracious, that face is marked by the melancholy of constant meditation.  For this reason Mademoiselle des Touches listens more than she talks.  She startles by her silence and by that deep-reaching glance of intense fixity.  No educated person could see her without thinking of Cleopatra, that dark little woman who almost changed the face of the world.  But in Camille the natural animal is so complete, so self-sufficing, of a nature so leonine, that a man, however little of a Turk he may be, regrets the presence of so great a mind in such a body, and could wish that she were wholly woman.  He fears to find the strange distortion of an abnormal soul.  Do not cold analysis and matter-of-fact theory point to passions in such a woman?  Does she judge, and not feel?  Or, phenomenon more terrible, does she not feel and judge at one and the same time?  Able for all things through her brain, ought her course to be circumscribed by the limitations of other women?  Has that intellectual strength weakened her heart?  Has she no charm?  Can she descend to those tender nothings by which a woman occupies, and soothes and interests the man she loves?  Will she not cast aside a sentiment when it no longer responds to some vision of infinitude which she grasps and contemplates in her soul?  Who can scale the heights to which her eyes have risen?  Yes, a man fears to find in such a woman something unattainable, unpossessable, unconquerable.  The woman of strong mind should remain a symbol; as a reality she must be feared.  Camille Maupin is in some ways the living image of Schiller’s Isis, seated in the darkness of the temple, at whose feet her priests find the dead bodies of the daring men who have consulted her.

The adventures of her life declared to be true by the world, and which Camille has never disavowed, enforce the questions suggested by her personal appearance.  Perhaps she likes those calumnies.