The pupils of the eyes, extremely bright, though striped with brown rays, gave to her glance the cruel fixity of a beast of prey, and betrayed the cold maliciousness of the courtesan.

The eyes were gray, fringed with black lashes,--a charming contrast, which made their expression of calm and contemplative voluptuousness the more observable; the circle round the eyes showed marks of fatigue, but the artistic manner in which she could turn her eyeballs, right and left, or up and down, to observe, or seem to mediate, the way in which she could hold them fixed, casting out their vivid fire without moving her head, without taking from her face its absolute immovability (a manoeuvre learned upon the stage), and the vivacity of their glance, as she looked about a theatre in search of a friend, made her eyes the most terrible, also the softest, in short, the most extraordinary eyes in the world.

Rouge had destroyed by this time the diaphanous tints of her cheeks, the flesh of which was still delicate; but although she could no longer blush or turn pale, she had a thin nose with rosy, passionate nostrils, made to express irony,--the mocking irony of Moliere's women-servants.

Her sensual mouth, expressive of sarcasm and love of dissipation, was adorned with a deep furrow that united the upper lip with the nose.

Her chin, white and rather fat, betrayed the violence of passion.