This mixture of diabolical imperfections and divine beauties, harmonious in spite of discords, for they blended in a species of savage dignity, also this triumph of a powerful soul over a feeble body, as written in those eyes, made the child, when once seen, unforgettable.  Nature had wished to make that frail young being a woman; the circumstances of her conception moulded her with the face and body of a boy.  A poet observing the strange creature would have declared her native clime to be Arabia the Blest; she belonged to the Afrite and Genii of Arabian tales.  Her face told no lies.  She had the soul of that glance of fire, the intellect of those lips made brilliant by the bewitching teeth, the thought enshrined within that glorious brow, the passion of those nostrils ready at all moments to snort flame.  Therefore love, such as we imagine it on burning sands, in lonely deserts, filled that heart of twenty in the breast of a child, doomed, like the snowy heights of Montenegro, to wear no flowers of the spring.

Observers ought now to understand how it was that La Pechina, from whom passion issued by every pore, awakened in perverted natures the feelings deadened by abuse; just as water fills the mouth at sight of those twisted, blotched, and speckled fruits which gourmands know by experience, and beneath whose skin nature has put the rarest flavors and perfumes.  Why did Nicolas, that vulgar laborer, pursue this being who was worthy of a poet, while the eyes of the country-folk pitied her as a sickly deformity?  Why did Rigou, the old man, feel the passion of a young one for this girl?  Which of the two men was young, and which was old?  Was the young peasant as blase as the old usurer?  Why did these two extremes of life meet in one common and devilish caprice?  Does the vigor that draws to its close resemble the vigor that is only dawning?  The moral perversities of men are gulfs guarded by sphinxes; they begin and end in questions to which there is no answer.

The exclamation, formerly quoted, of the countess, “Piccina!” when she first saw Genevieve by the roadside, open-mouthed at sight of the carriage and the elegantly dressed woman within it, will be understood.  This girl, almost a dwarf, of Montenegrin vigor, loved the handsome, noble bailiff, as children of her age love, when they do love, that is to say, with childlike passion, with the strength of youth, with the devotion which in truly virgin souls gives birth to divinest poesy.  Catherine had just swept her coarse hands across the sensitive strings of that choice harp, strung to the breaking-point.  To dance before Michaud, to shine at the Soulanges ball and inscribe herself on the memory of that adored master!  What glorious thoughts!  To fling them into that volcanic head was like casting live coals upon straw dried in the August sun.

“No, Catherine,” replied La Pechina, “I am ugly and puny; my lot is to sit in a corner and never to be married, but live alone in the world.”