Adroitly leading the innocent heart to forget Nicolas and so put it off its guard, Catherine distilled into the girl the insidious nectar of compliments.  Unawares, she touched a secret wound.  La Pechina, without being other than a poor peasant girl, was a specimen of alarming precocity, like many another creature doomed to die as prematurely as it blooms.  Strange product of Burgundian and Montenegrin blood, conceived and born amid the toils of war, the girl was doubtless in many ways the result of her congenital circumstances.  Thin, slender, brown as a tobacco leaf, and short in stature, she nevertheless possessed extraordinary strength,—­a strength unseen by the eyes of peasants, to whom the mysteries of the nervous system are unknown.  Nerves are not admitted into the medical rural mind.

At thirteen years of age Genevieve had completed her growth, though she was hardly as tall as an ordinary girl of her age.  Did her face owe its topaz skin, so dark and yet so brilliant, dark in tone and brilliant in the quality of its tissue, giving a look of age to the childish face, to her Montenegrin origin, or to the ardent sun of Burgundy?  Medical science may dismiss the inquiry.  The premature old age on the surface of the face was counterbalanced by the glow, the fire, the wealth of light which made the eyes two stars.  Like all eyes which fill with sunlight and need, perhaps, some sheltering screen, the eyelids were fringed with lashes of extraordinary length.  The hair, of a bluish black, long and fine and abundant, crowned a brow moulded like that of the Farnese Juno.  That magnificent diadem of hair, those grand Armenian eyes, that celestial brow eclipsed the rest of the face.  The nose, though pure in form as it left the brow, and graceful in curve, ended in flattened and flaring nostrils.  Anger increased this effect at times, and then the face wore an absolutely furious expression.  All the lower part of the face, like the lower part of the nose, seemed unfinished, as if the clay in the hands of the divine sculptor had proved insufficient.  Between the lower lip and the chin the space was so short that any one taking La Pechina by the chin would have rubbed the lip; but the teeth prevented all notice of this defect.  One might almost believe those little bones had souls, so brilliant were they, so polished, so transparent, so exquisitely shaped, disclosed as they were by too wide a mouth, curved in lines that bore resemblance to the fantastic shapes of coral.  The shells of the ears were so transparent to the light that in the sunshine they were rose-colored.  The complexion, though sun-burned, showed a marvellous delicacy in the texture of the skin.  If, as Buffon declared, love lies in touch, the softness of the girl’s skin must have had the penetrating and inciting influence of the fragrance of daturas.  The chest and indeed the whole body was alarmingly thin; but the feet and hands, of alluring delicacy, showed remarkable nervous power, and a vigorous organism.