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drooped its branches almost into the window of the miser's sanctum.
A clear day and the beautiful autumnal sun common to the banks of the
Loire was beginning to melt the hoar-frost which the night had laid on
these picturesque objects, on the walls, and on the plants which
swathed the court-yard. Eugenie found a novel charm in the aspect of
things lately so insignificant to her. A thousand confused thoughts
came to birth in her mind and grew there, as the sunbeams grew without
along the wall. She felt that impulse of delight, vague, inexplicable,
which wraps the moral being as a cloud wraps the physical body. Her
thoughts were all in keeping with the details of this strange
landscape, and the harmonies of her heart blended with the harmonies
of nature. When the sun reached an angle of the wall where the
"Venus-hair" of southern climes drooped its thick leaves, lit with the
changing colors of a pigeon's breast, celestial rays of hope illumined
the future to her eyes, and thenceforth she loved to gaze upon that
piece of wall, on its pale flowers, its blue harebells, its wilting
herbage, with which she mingled memories as tender as those of
childhood. The noise made by each leaf as it fell from its twig in the
void of that echoing court gave answer to the secret questionings of
the young girl, who could have stayed there the livelong day without
perceiving the flight of time. Then came tumultuous heavings of the
soul. She rose often, went to her glass, and looked at herself, as an
author in good faith looks at his work to criticise it and blame it in
his own mind.
"I am not beautiful enough for him!" Such was Eugenie's thought,--a
humble thought, fertile in suffering. The poor girl did not do herself
justice; but modesty, or rather fear, is among the first of love's
virtues. Eugenie belonged to the type of children with sturdy
constitutions, such as we see among the lesser bourgeoisie, whose
beauties always seem a little vulgar; and yet, though she resembled
the Venus of Milo, the lines of her figure were ennobled by the softer
Christian sentiment which purifies womanhood and gives it a
distinction unknown to the sculptors of antiquity. She had an enormous
head, with the masculine yet delicate forehead of the Jupiter of
Phidias, and gray eyes, to which her chaste life, penetrating fully
into them, carried a flood of light. The features of her round face,
formerly fresh and rosy, were at one time swollen by the small-pox,
which destroyed the velvet texture of the skin, though it kindly left
no other traces, and her cheek was still so soft and delicate that her
mother's kiss made a momentary red mark upon it. Her nose was somewhat
too thick, but it harmonized well with the vermilion mouth, whose
lips, creased in many lines, were full of love and kindness. The
throat was exquisitely round. The bust, well curved and carefully
covered, attracted the eye and inspired reverie.
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