"As we may incur reproach for following on the heels of portrait
painters, auctioneers, and fashionable dressmakers, I will not inflict
any description upon you of _her_ in whom Godefroid recognized the
female of his species. Age, nineteen; height, four feet eleven inches;
fair hair, eyebrows _idem_, blue eyes, forehead neither high nor low,
curved nose, little mouth, short turned-up chin, oval face;
distinguishing signs--none. Such was the description on the passport
of the beloved object. You will not ask more than the police, or their
worships the mayors, of all the towns and communes of France, the
gendarmes and the rest of the powers that be? In other respects--I
give you my word for it--she was a rough sketch of a Venus dei
Medici.

"The first time that Godefroid went to one of the balls for which Mme.
de Nucingen enjoyed a certain not undeserved reputation, he caught a
glimpse of his future lady-love in a quadrille, and was set marveling
by that height of four feet eleven inches. The fair hair rippled in a
shower of curls about the little girlish head, she looked as fresh as
a naiad peeping out through the crystal pane of her stream to take a
look at the spring flowers. (This is quite in the modern style,
strings of phrases as endless as the macaroni on the table a while
ago.) On that 'eyebrows _idem_' (no offence to the prefect of police)
Parny, that writer of light and playful verse, would have hung
half-a-dozen couplets, comparing them very agreeably to Cupid's bow,
at the same time bidding us to observe that the dart was beneath; the
said dart, however, was neither very potent nor very penetrating, for
as yet it was controlled by the namby-pamby sweetness of a Mlle. de
la Valliere as depicted on fire-screens, at the moment when she
solemnizes her betrothal in the sight of heaven, any solemnization
before the registrar being quite out to the question.