At eighteen Mademoiselle de Watteville was a slight, thin girl with a
flat figure, fair, colorless, and insignificant to the last degree.
Her eyes, of a very light blue, borrowed beauty from their lashes,
which, when downcast, threw a shadow on her cheeks. A few freckles
marred the whiteness of her forehead, which was shapely enough. Her
face was exactly like those of Albert Durer's saints, or those of the
painters before Perugino; the same plump, though slender modeling, the
same delicacy saddened by ecstasy, the same severe guilelessness.
Everything about her, even to her attitude, was suggestive of those
virgins, whose beauty is only revealed in its mystical radiance to the
eyes of the studious connoisseur. She had fine hands though red, and a
pretty foot, the foot of an aristocrat.
She habitually wore simple checked cotton dresses; but on Sundays and
in the evening her mother allowed her silk. The cut of her frocks,
made at Besancon, almost made her ugly, while her mother tried to
borrow grace, beauty, and elegance from Paris fashions; for through
Monsieur de Soulas she procured the smallest trifles of her dress from
thence. Rosalie had never worn a pair of silk stockings or thin boots,
but always cotton stockings and leather shoes. On high days she was
dressed in a muslin frock, her hair plainly dressed, and had bronze
kid shoes.
This education, and her own modest demeanor, hid in Rosalie a spirit
of iron.
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