the mistress of the house, as she came and went, sat and chatted,

beckoned to this one or that, asked questions, listened to the
answers, as she leaned against the frame of the door; I detected a

languid charm in her movements, a grace in the flutterings of her
dress, remarked the nature of the feelings she so powerfully excited,

and became very incredulous as to her virtue. If Foedora would none of
love to-day, she had had strong passions at some time; past experience

of pleasure showed itself in the attitudes she chose in conversation,
in her coquettish way of leaning against the panel behind her; she

seemed scarcely able to stand alone, and yet ready for flight from too
bold a glance. There was a kind of eloquence about her lightly folded

arms, which, even for benevolent eyes, breathed sentiment. Her fresh
red lips sharplycontrasted with her brilliantly pale complexion. Her

brown hair brought out all the golden color in her eyes, in which blue
streaks mingled as in Florentine marble; their expression seemed to

increase the significance of her words. A studied grace lay in the
charms of her bodice. Perhaps a rival might have found the lines of

the thick eyebrows, which almost met, a little hard; or found a fault
in the almost visible" target="_blank" title="a.看不见的；无形的">invisible down that covered her features. I saw the

signs of passion everywhere, written on those Italian eyelids, on the
splendid shoulders worthy of the Venus of Milo, on her features, in

the darker shade of down above a somewhat thick under-lip. She was not
merely a woman, but a romance. The whole blended harmony of lines, the

feminine luxuriance of her frame, and its passionate promise, were
subdued by a constantinexplicable reserve and modesty at variance

with everything else about her. It needed an observation as keen as my
own to detect such signs as these in her character. To explain myself

more clearly; there were two women in Foedora, divided perhaps by the
line between head and body: the one, the head alone, seemed to be

susceptible, and the other phlegmatic. She prepared her glance before
she looked at you, something unspeakably mysterious, some inward

convulsion seemed revealed by her glittering eyes.
"So, to be brief, either my imperfect moral science had left me a good

deal to learn in the moral world, or a lofty soul dwelt in the
countess, lent to her face those charms that fascinated and subdued

us, and gave her an ascendency only the more complete because it
comprehended a sympathy of desire.

"I went away completely enraptured with this woman, dazzled by the
luxury around her, gratified in every faculty of my soul--noble and

base, good and evil. When I felt myself so excited, eager, and elated,
I thought I understood the attraction that drew thither those artists,

diplomatists, men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple
brass. They came, no doubt, to find in her society the delirious

emotion that now thrilled through every fibre in me, throbbing through
my brain, setting the blood a-tingle in every vein, fretting even the

tiniest nerve. And she had given herself to none, so as to keep them
all. A woman is a coquette so long as she knows not love.

" 'Well,' I said to Rastignac, 'they married her, or sold her perhaps,
to some old man, and recollections of her first marriage have caused

her aversion for love.'
"I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honore, where Foedora lived.

Almost all the breadth of Paris lies between her mansion and the Rue
des Cordiers, but the distance seemed short, in spite of the cold. And

I was to lay siege to Foedora's heart, in winter, and a bitter winter,
with only thirty francs in my possession, and such a distance as that

lay between us! Only a poor man knows what such a passion costs in
cab-hire, gloves, linen, tailor's bills, and the like. If the Platonic

stage lasts a little too long, the affair grows ruinous. As a matter
of fact, there is many a Lauzun among students of law, who finds it

impossible to approach a ladylove living on a first floor. And I,
sickly, thin, poorly dressed, wan and pale as any artist convalescent

after a work, how could I compete with other young men, curled,
handsome, smart, outcravatting Croatia; wealthy" target="_blank" title="a.富有的；丰富的">wealthy men, equipped with

tilburys, and armed with assurance?
" 'Bah, death or Foedora!' I cried, as I went round by a bridge; 'my

fortune lies in Foedora.'
"That gothic boudoir and Louis Quatorze salon came before my eyes. I

saw the countess again in her white dress with its large graceful
sleeves, and all the fascinations of her form and movements. These

pictures of Foedora and her luxurious surroundings haunted me even in
my bare, cold garret, when at last I reached it, as disheveled as any

naturalist's wig. The contrast suggested evil counsel; in such a way
crimes are conceived. I cursed my honest, self-respecting poverty, my

garret where such teeming fancies had stirred within me. I trembled
with fury, I reproached God, the devil, social conditions, my own

father, the whole universe, indeed, with my fate and my misfortunes. I
went hungry to bed, muttering ludicrous imprecations, but fully

determined to win Foedora. Her heart was my last ticket in the
lottery, my fortune depended upon it.

"I spare you the history of my earlier visits, to reach the drama the
sooner. In my efforts to appeal to her, I essayed to engage her

intellect and her vanity on my side; in order to secure her love, I
gave her any quantity of reasons for increasing her self-esteem; I

never left her in a state of indifference; women like emotions at any
cost, I gave them to her in plenty; I would rather have had her angry

with me than indifferent.
"At first, urged by a strong will and a desire for her love, I assumed

a little authority, but my own feelings grew stronger and mastered me;
I relapsed into truth, I lost my head, and fell desperately in love.

"I am not very sure what we mean by the word love in our poetry and
our talk; but I know that I have never found in all the ready

rhetorical phrases of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in whose room perhaps I
was lodging; nor among the feeble inventions of two centuries of our

literature, nor in any picture that Italy has produced, a
representation of the feelings that expanded all at once in my double

nature. The view of the lake of Bienne, some music of Rossini's, the
Madonna of Murillo's now in the possession of General Soult,

Lescombat's letters, a few sayings scattered through collections of
anecdotes; but most of all the prayers of religious ecstatics, and

passages in our fabliaux,--these things alone have power to carry me
back to the divine heights of my first love.

"Nothing expressed in human language, no thought reproducible in
color, marble, sound, or articulate speech, could ever render the

force, the truth, the completeness, the suddenness with which love
awoke in me. To speak of art, is to speak of illusion. Love passes

through endless transformations before it passes for ever into our
existence and makes it glow with its own color of flame. The process

is imperceptible, and baffles the artist's analysis. Its moans and
complaints are tedious to an uninterested spectator. One would need to

be very much in love to share the furious transports of Lovelace, as
one reads Clarissa Harlowe. Love is like some fresh spring, that

leaves its cresses, its gravel bed and flowers to become first a
stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it

flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted
natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in

endless contemplation.
"How can I dare to describe the hues of fleetingemotions, the

nothings beyond all price, the spoken accents that beggar language,
the looks that hold more than all the wealth of poetry? Not one of the

mysterious scenes that draw us insensibly nearer and nearer to a
woman, but has depths in it which can swallow up all the poetry that

ever was written. How can the inner life and mystery that stirs in our
souls penetrate through our glozes, when we have not even words to

describe the visible and outward mysteries of beauty? What enchantment
steeped me for how many hours in unspeakablerapture, filled with the

sight of Her! What made me happy? I know not. That face of hers
overflowed with light at such times; it seemed in some way to glow

with it; the outlines of her face, with the scarcely perceptible down
on its delicate surface, shone with a beauty belonging to the far

distant horizon that melts into the sunlight. The light of day seemed
to caress her as she mingled in it; rather it seemed that the light of

her eyes was brighter than the daylight itself; or some shadow passing
over that fair face made a kind of change there, altering its hues and

its expression. Some thought would often seem to glow on her white
brows; her eyes appeared to dilate, and her eyelids trembled; a smile

rippled over her features; the living coral of her lips grew full of
meaning as they closed and unclosed; an indistinguishable something in

her hair made brown shadows on her fair temples; in each new phase
Foedora spoke. Every slight variation in her beauty made a new

pleasure for my eyes, disclosed charms my heart had never known
before; I tried to read a separate emotion or a hope in every change

that passed over her face. This mute converse passed between soul and
soul, like sound and answering echo; and the short-lived delights then