"The waist," he said, "the waist, since one has to make use of that
hideous word, should be a gradual, imperceptible, gentle transition from
one to another of woman's two glories, her bosom and her womb, and you
stupidly strangle it, you stave in the thorax, which involves the
breasts in its ruin, you flatten your lower ribs, and you plough a
horrible furrow above the navel. 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. With a ringing laugh she crossed the dressing-room towards
the doctor, dragging with her Madame Michon, who was holding on to her
stay-laces as though they were reins, with the look of a sorceress being
whisked away to a witches' sabbath.

"Don't be afraid!" she said.