At the time of the marriage, Celeste was seen to be a little woman,
fair and faded almost to sickliness, fat, slow, and silly in the
countenance. Her forehead, much too large and too prominent, suggested
water on the brain, and beneath that waxen cupola her face, noticeably
too small and ending in a point like the nose of a mouse, made some
people fear she would become, sooner or later, imbecile. Her eyes,
which were light blue, and her lips, always fixed in a smile, did not
contradict that idea. On the solemn occasion of her marriage she had
the manner, air, and attitude of a person condemned to death, whose
only desire is that it might all be over speedily.

"She is rather round," said Colleville to Thuillier.

Brigitte was just the knife to cut into such a nature, to which her
own formed the strongest contrast. Mademoiselle Thuillier was
remarkable for her regular and correct beauty, but a beauty injured by
toil which, from her very childhood, had bent her down to painful,
thankless tasks, and by the secret privations she imposed upon herself
in order to amass her little property. Her complexion, early
discolored, had something the tint of steel. Her brown eyes were
framed in brown; on the upper lip was a brown floss like a sort of
smoke. Her lips were thin, and her imperious forehead was surmounted
by hair once black, now turning to chinchilla. She held herself as
straight as the fairest beauty; but all things else about her showed
the hardiness of her life, the deadening of her natural fire, the cost
of what she was!

To Brigitte, Celeste was simply a fortune to lay hold of, a future
mother to rule, one more subject in her empire. She soon reproached
her for being _weak_, a constant word in her vocabulary, and the jealous