physiology is so busy with the human heart. The incandescence, so to
call it, was on the left side. 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. Everything about this dainty chevalier
bespoke the "ladies' man." He was so minute in his ablutions that his
cheeks were a pleasure to look upon; they seemed to have been laved in
some miraculous water. The part of his skull which his hair refused to
cover shone like ivory. His eyebrows, like his hair, affected youth by
the care and regularity with which they were combed. His skin, already
white, seemed to have been extra-whitened by some secret compound.
Without using perfumes, the chevalier exhaled a certain fragrance of
youth, that refreshed the atmosphere. His hands, which were those of a
gentleman, and were cared for like the hands of a pretty woman,