The la-conic answer she gave me, seen against the backdrop of all the many sorrows one might imagine, sent a small shiver down my spine. La Griffith told me once again that I must not be dazzled by anything I find in the world and must be wary of everything, especially what pleases me most. She knows nothing more and can tell me nothing more. Her lectures are too much of a piece. She has this in common with a bird that knows only one song.

3

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

December

My dear, I am ready to make my entrance into society; I have done my best to be very free before settling down for its sake. This morning, after countless fittings, I found myself well and properly corseted, shod, cinched, coiffed, dressed, adorned. I did as a duelist does before facing his foe: I practiced behind closed doors. I wanted to see how I looked fully armed, and I was gratified to find a triumphant, conquering air before which there will be no choice but surrender. I studied and judged my reflection. I reviewed my forces, putting into practice that great maxim of antiquity: Know thyself! I was infinitely pleased to make my acquaintance. Griffith alone was allowed to be present and watch me play doll—I was the doll and the child at once. You think you know me? You do not!

Here, Renée, is the portrait of your sister, once disguised as a Carmelite, now resuscitated as a blithe and worldly girl. I am one of the most beautiful young women of France, Provence excepted. There, I think, is an accurate summary of this whole pleasant chapter. I have flaws, but if I were a man I would love them, for they are the sign of a promise yet to be fulfilled. When for two weeks straight one has admired the exquisite curve of one’s mother’s arms, and when that mother is the Duchess de Chaulieu, my dear, one is none too pleased to discover that one’s own arms are skinny, but one consoles oneself with one’s dainty wrists, with the elegant lines sketched out by those hollows, soon to be full, plump, and shapely, with soft, satin flesh. The faint angularity of the arm can also be seen in the shoulders. In truth, I have no shoulders, only hard shoulder blades forming two jagged planes. My waist is equally unsupple, and there is no litheness in my hips.

There, I’ve told you all. But those forms are delicate and firm, the bright, pure flame of good health burns in those sinewy limbs, life and blue blood pulse in abundance beneath a transparent skin. But next to me blond Eve’s blondest daughter is a Negress! But I have a foot like a gazelle! But every curve is delicate, and I have the regular features of a Greek portrait. My skin tones are not perfectly even, it’s true, mademoiselle, but they glow: I am a very pretty green fruit, with the same green freshness. In short, I resemble the figure emerging from a violet-tinged lily in my aunt’s missal. My blue eyes are not mindless but proud, in two settings of living nacre shaded by pretty little fibrils; my long, close-set lashes are like silken fringe. My brow gleams, my hair’s roots are perfectly sown, creating little waves of pale gold, browner in the middle, with an occasional rebellious lock slipping free to assert with some eloquence that I am not an insipid, fainting blond but a southern, hot-blooded blond, a blond who strikes before she can be struck. The coiffeur even wanted to part it in the middle, smooth it down, and adorn my brow with a pearl on a golden chain, telling me I would seem something straight from the Middle Ages. “Allow me to inform you that I am too young to be in the middle of any age, or to require an ornament to make me seem younger!” My nose is thin, the nostrils neatly cut out and separated by a charming pink partition: a haughty and superior nose, its tip too fine to ever grow fat or red. My doe, if that’s not enough to have a girl snatched up with no dowry, then I don’t know what’s what. My ears make teasing twists and turns, a pearl would look yellow against the lobe. I have a long neck, endowed with the kind of serpentine motion that confers such majesty on a woman.