The negresses, who file their teeth down to a point, and split their lips, in order to insert a wooden disc, disfigure themselves in a less barbarous fashion.

For, after all, some feminine splendour still remains to a creature who wears rings in the cartilage of her nose, and whose lip is distended by a circular disc of mahogany as big as this pomade pot.

But the devastation is complete when woman carries her ravages into the sacred centre of her empire." Dwelling upon a favourite subject, he enumerated one by one the deformities of the bones and muscles caused by the wearing of stays, in terms now fanciful, now precise, now droll, now lugubrious.
Nanteuil laughed as she listened.

She laughed because, being a woman, she felt an inclination to laugh at physical uncomeliness or poverty; because, referring everything to her own little world of actors and actresses, each and every deformity described by the doctor reminded her of some comrade of the boards, stamping itself on her mind like a caricature.

Knowing that she herself had a good figure, she delighted in her own young body as she pictured to herself all these indignities of the flesh.