She held out her right cheek, and he began by touching it lightly with the brush here and there, as though he were putting little points of paint on it.  He did the same with the left cheek, then with the chin, and the forehead, and then exclaimed: 

“See, there is nothing there now, nothing at all!”

She took up the mirror, gazed at her reflection with profound, eager attention, with a strong mental effort to discover something, then she sighed: 

“No.  It hardly shows at all.  I am infinitely obliged to you.”

The doctor had risen.  He bowed to her, ushered me out and followed me, and, as soon as he had locked the door, said: 

“Here is the history of this unhappy woman.”

Her name is Mme. Hermet.  She was once very beautiful, a great coquette, very much beloved and very much in-love with life.

She was one of those women who have nothing but their beauty and their love of admiration to sustain, guide or comfort them in this life.  The constant anxiety to retain her freshness, the care of her complexion, of her hands, her teeth, of every portion of body that was visible, occupied all her time and all her attention.

She became a widow, with one son.  The boy was brought up as are all children of society beauties.  She was, however, very fond of him.

He grew up, and she grew older.  Whether she saw the fatal crisis approaching, I cannot say.  Did she, like so many others, gaze for hours and hours at her skin, once so fine, so transparent and free from blemish, now beginning to shrivel slightly, to be crossed with a thousand little lines, as yet imperceptible, that will grow deeper day by day, month by month?  Did she also see slowly, but surely, increasing traces of those long wrinkles on the forehead, those slender serpents that nothing can check?  Did she suffer the torture, the abominable torture of the mirror, the little mirror with the silver handle which one cannot make up one’s mind to lay down on the table, but then throws down in disgust only to take it up again in order to look more closely, and still more closely at the hateful and insidious approaches of old age?  Did she shut herself up ten times, twenty times a day, leaving her friends chatting in the drawing-room, and go up to her room where, under the protection of bolts and bars, she would again contemplate the work of time on her ripe beauty, now beginning to wither, and recognize with despair the gradual progress of the process which no one else had as yet seemed to perceive, but of which she, herself, was well aware.  She knows where to seek the most serious, the gravest traces of age.  And the mirror, the little round hand-glass in its carved silver frame, tells her horrible things; for it speaks, it seems to laugh, it jeers and tells her all that is going to occur, all the physical discomforts and the atrocious mental anguish she will suffer until the day of her death, which will be the day of her deliverance.