She had a fine, clear-cut, rather tragic profile. She had not the marked
heavy lines of the Roman style: on the contrary, her lines were delicate
and Parisian, _a la _Jean Goujon--as much like a boy's as a
woman's. A short, finely-modeled nose. A beautiful mouth, with thin
lips, curling rather bitterly. Bright cheeks, girlishly thin, in which
there was something touching, the light of inward suffering. A strong
chin. Pale complexion. One of those habitually impassive faces which are
transparent in spite of themselves, and reveal the soul quivering behind
it, as though it were exposed in its nakedness; one of those faces in
which the soul seems to be ever, in every part of it, just beneath the
skin. She had very fine hair and eyebrows, and her changing eyes were
gray and amber-colored, passing quickly from one light to another,
greenish and golden, like the eyes of a cat. And there was something
catlike in all her nature, in her apparent torpor, her semi-somnolence,
with eyes wide open, always on the watch, always suspicious, while
suddenly she would nervously and rather cruelly relax her watchfulness.
She was not so tall as she appeared, nor so slender; she had beautiful
shoulders, lovely arms, and fine, long hands. She was very neat in her
dress, and her coiffure, always trim and tasteful, with none of the
Bohemian carelessness or the exaggerated smartness of many artists--even
in that she was catlike, instinctively aristocratic, although she had
risen from the gutter. At bottom she was incurably shy and wild.

She must have been a little less than thirty. Christophe had heard
people speak of her at Gamache's with coarse admiration, as a woman of
great freedom, intelligence, and boldness, tremendous and inflexible
energy, and burning ambition, but bitter, fantastic, perplexing, and
violent, a woman who had waded through a deal of mud before she had
reached her present pinnacle of fame, and had since avenged herself.