Josiana was “the flesh.”  Nothing could be more resplendent.  She was very tall—­too tall.  Her hair was of that tinge which might be called red gold.  She was plump, fresh, strong, and rosy, with immense boldness and wit.  She had eyes which were too intelligible.  She had neither lovers nor chastity.  She walled herself round with pride.  Men! oh, fie! a god only would be worthy of her, or a monster.  If virtue consists in the protection of an inaccessible position, Josiana possessed all possible virtue, but without any innocence.  She disdained intrigues; but she would not have been displeased had she been supposed to have engaged in some, provided that the objects were uncommon, and proportioned to the merits of one so highly placed.  She thought little of her reputation, but much of her glory.  To appear yielding, and to be unapproachable, is perfection.  Josiana felt herself majestic and material.  Hers was a cumbrous beauty.  She usurped rather than charmed.  She trod upon hearts.  She was earthly.  She would have been as much astonished at being proved to have a soul in her bosom as wings on her back.  She discoursed on Locke; she was polite; she was suspected of knowing Arabic.

To be “the flesh” and to be woman are two different things.  Where a woman is vulnerable, on the side of pity, for instance, which so readily turns to love, Josiana was not.  Not that she was unfeeling.  The ancient comparison of flesh to marble is absolutely false.  The beauty of flesh consists in not being marble:  its beauty is to palpitate, to tremble, to blush, to bleed, to have firmness without hardness, to be white without being cold, to have its sensations and its infirmities; its beauty is to be life, and marble is death.

Flesh, when it attains a certain degree of beauty, has almost a claim to the right of nudity; it conceals itself in its own dazzling charms as in a veil.  He who might have looked upon Josiana nude would have perceived her outlines only through a surrounding glory.  She would have shown herself without hesitation to a satyr or a eunuch.  She had the self-possession of a goddess.  To have made her nudity a torment, ever eluding a pursuing Tantalus, would have been an amusement to her.

The king had made her a duchess, and Jupiter a Nereid—­a double irradiation of which the strange, brightness of this creature was composed.  In admiring her you felt yourself becoming a pagan and a lackey.  Her origin had been bastardy and the ocean.  She appeared to have emerged from the foam.  From the stream had risen the first jet of her destiny; but the spring was royal.  In her there was something of the wave, of chance, of the patrician, and of the tempest.  She was well read and accomplished.  Never had a passion approached her, yet she had sounded them all.  She had a disgust for realizations, and at the same time a taste for them.  If she had stabbed herself, it would, like Lucretia, not have been until afterwards.  She was a virgin stained