men, reduce impulse to action. In this alone, perhaps, lies the
difference between natural and civilized man. The savage has only
impulse; the civilized man has impulses and ideas. And in the savage
the brain retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at
the mercy of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the
civilized man, ideas sink into the heart and change it; he has a
thousand interests and many feelings, where the savage has but one at
a time. This is the cause of the transient ascendency of a child over
its parents, which ceases as soon as it is satisfied; in the man who
is still one with nature, this contrast is constant. Cousin Betty, a
savage of Lorraine, somewhat treacherous too, was of this class of
natures, which are commoner among the lower orders than is supposed,
accounting for the conduct of the populace during revolutions.



At the time when this _Drama_ opens, if Cousin Betty would have
allowed herself to be dressed like other people; if, like the women of
Paris, she had been accustomed to wear each fashion in its turn, she
would have been presentable and acceptable, but she preserved the
stiffness of a stick. Now a woman devoid of all the graces, in Paris
simply does not exist. The fine but hard eyes, the severe features,
the Calabrian fixity of complexion which made Lisbeth like a figure by
Giotto, and of which a true Parisian would have taken advantage, above
all, her strange way of dressing, gave her such an extraordinary
appearance that she sometimes looked like one of those monkeys in
petticoats taken about by little Savoyards. As she was well known in
the houses connected by family which she frequented, and restricted
her social efforts to that little circle, as she liked her own home,
her singularities no longer astonished anybody; and out of doors they