power, and a vigorous organism.

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