divine.  If, on some excuse or other, she could wear the costume of the time when women had long, pointed bodices, rising, slim and slender, from voluminous brocaded skirts with folds so heavy that they stood alone, and could hide her arms in those wadded sleeves with ruffles, from which the hand comes out like a pistil from a calyx, and could fling back the curls of her head into the jewelled knot behind her head, Beatrix would hold her own victoriously with ideal beauties like that—­”

And Felicite showed Calyste a fine copy of a picture by Mieris, in which was a woman robed in white satin, standing with a paper in her hand, and singing with a Brabancon seigneur, while a Negro beside them poured golden Spanish wine into a goblet, and the old housekeeper in the background arranged some biscuits.

“Fair women, blonds,” said Camille, “have the advantage over us poor brown things of a precious diversity; there are a hundred ways for a blonde to charm, and only one for a brunette.  Besides, blondes are more womanly; we are too like men, we French brunettes—­Well, well!” she cried, “pray don’t fall in love with Beatrix from the portrait I am making of her, like that prince, I forget his name, in the Arabian Nights.  You would be too late, my dear boy.”

These words were said pointedly.  The admiration depicted on the young man’s face was more for the picture than for the painter whose faire was failing of its purpose.  As she spoke, Felicite was employing all the resources of her eloquent physiognomy.

“Blond as she is, however,” she went on, “Beatrix has not the grace of her color; her lines are severe; she is elegant, but hard; her face has a harsh contour, though at times it reveals a soul with Southern passions; an angel flashes out and then expires.  Her eyes are thirsty.  She looks best when seen full face; the profile has an air of being squeezed between two doors.  You will see if I am mistaken.  I will tell you now what made us intimate friends.  For three years, from 1828 to 1831, Beatrix, while enjoying the last fetes of the Restoration, making the round of the salons, going to court, taking part in the fancy-balls of the Elysee-Bourbon, was all the while judging men, and things, events, and life itself, from the height of her own thought.  Her mind was busy.  These first years of the bewilderment the world caused her prevented her heart from waking up.  From 1830 to 1831 she spent the time of the revolutionary disturbance at her husband’s country-place, where she was bored like a saint in paradise.  On her return to Paris she became convinced, perhaps justly, that the revolution of July, in the minds of some persons purely political, would prove to be a moral revolution.  The social class to which she belonged, not being able, during its unhoped-for triumph in the fifteen years of the Restoration to reconstruct itself, was about to go to pieces, bit by bit, under the battering-ram of the bourgeoisie.