delicate, round, and self-willed head of Pompeia, with features of
elegant correctness, and the smooth forehead of a woman who drives all
care away and all reflection, who yields easily, but is capable of
balking like a mule, and incapable at such times of listening to
reason. That forehead, turned, as it were, with one cut of the chisel,
brought out the beauty of the golden hair, which was raised in front,
after the Roman fashion, in two equal masses, and twisted up behind
the head to prolong the line of the neck, and enhance that whiteness
by its beautiful color. Black and delicate eyebrows, drawn by a
Chinese brush, encircled the soft eyelids, which were threaded with
rosy fibres. 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