[An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac]@TWC D-Link book
An Old Maid

CHAPTER I
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Though his long slim legs, supporting a lank body, and his pallid skin, were not indicative of health, Monsieur de Valois ate like an ogre and declared he had a malady called in the provinces "hot liver," perhaps to excuse his monstrous appetite.

The circumstance of his singular flush confirmed this declaration; but in a region where repasts are developed on the line of thirty or forty dishes and last four hours, the chevalier's stomach would seem to have been a blessing bestowed by Providence on the good town of Alencon.

According to certain doctors, heat on the left side denotes a prodigal heart.
The chevalier's gallantries confirmed this scientific assertion, the responsibility for which does not rest, fortunately, on the historian.
In spite of these symptoms, Monsieur de Valois' constitution was vigorous, consequently long-lived.

If his liver "heated," to use an old-fashioned word, his heart was not less inflammable.

His face was wrinkled and his hair silvered; but an intelligent observer would have recognized at once the stigmata of passion and the furrows of pleasure which appeared in the crow's-feet and the marches-du-palais, so prized at the court of Cythera.


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