Descriptions of Women:
A woman admired (from "Paz"):
Madame Laginska was silent, examining Adam. With her feet extended
upon a cushion and her head poised like that of a bird on the edge of
its nest listening to the noises in a grove, she would have seemed
enchanting even to a blase man. Fair and slender, and wearing her hair
in curls, she was not unlike those semi-romantic pictures in the
Keepsakes, especially when dressed, as she was this morning, in a
breakfast gown of Persian silk, the folds of which could not disguise
the beauty of her figure or the slimness of her waist. The silk with
its brilliant colors being crossed upon the bosom showed the spring of
the neck,--its whiteness contrasting delightfully against the tones of
a guipure lace which lay upon her shoulders. Her eyes and their long
black lashes added at this moment to the expression of curiosity which
puckered her pretty mouth. On the forehead, which was well modelled,
an observer would have noticed a roundness characteristic of the true
Parisian woman,--self-willed, merry, well-informed, but inaccessible
to vulgar seductions. Her hands, which were almost transparent, were
hanging down at the end of each arm of her chair; the tapering
fingers, slightly turned up at their points, showed nails like
almonds, which caught the light. Adam smiled at his wife\'s impatience,
and looked at her with a glance which two years of married life had
not yet chilled. Already the little countess had made herself mistress
of the situation, for she scarcely paid attention to her husband\'s
admiration. In fact, in the look which she occasionally cast at him,
there seemed to be the consciousness of a Frenchwoman\'s ascendancy
over the puny, volatile, and red-haired Pole.
A short Portuguese woman from "Scenes from a Courtesan's Life" :
Clotilde was more than five feet four in height; if we may be allowed
to use a familiar phrase, which has the merit at any rate of being
perfectly intelligible--she was all legs. These defective proportions
gave her figure an almost deformed appearance. With a dark complexion,
harsh black hair, very thick eyebrows, fiery eyes, set in sockets that
were already deeply discolored, a side face shaped like the moon in
its first quarter, and a prominent brow, she was the caricature of her
mother, one of the handsomest women in Portugal. Nature amuses herself
with such tricks. Often we see in one family a sister of wonderful
beauty, whose features in her brother are absolutely hideous, though
the two are amazingly alike. Clotilde\'s lips, excessively thin and
sunken, wore a permanent expression of disdain. And yet her mouth,
better than any other feature of her face, revealed every secret
impulse of her heart, for affection lent it a sweet expression, which
was all the more remarkable because her cheeks were too sallow for
blushes, and her hard, black eyes never told anything. Notwithstanding
these defects, notwithstanding her board-like carriage, she had by
birth and education a grand air, a proud demeanor, in short,
everything that has been well named le je ne sais quoi, due partly,
perhaps, to her uncompromising simplicity of dress, which stamped her
as a woman of noble blood. She dressed her hair to advantage, and it
might be accounted to her for a beauty, for it grew vigorously, thick
and long.
A girl:
At thirteen years of age Genevieve had completed her growth, though
she was hardly as tall as an ordinary girl of her age. Did her face
owe its topaz skin, so dark and yet so brilliant, dark in tone and
brilliant in the quality of its tissue, giving a look of age to the
childish face, to her Montenegrin origin, or to the ardent sun of
Burgundy? Medical science may dismiss the inquiry. The premature old
age on the surface of the face was counterbalanced by the glow, the
fire, the wealth of light which made the eyes two stars. Like all eyes
which fill with sunlight and need, perhaps, some sheltering screen,
the eyelids were fringed with lashes of extraordinary length. The
hair, of a bluish black, long and fine and abundant, crowned a brow
moulded like that of the Farnese Juno. That magnificent diadem of
hair, those grand Armenian eyes, that celestial brow eclipsed the rest
of the face. The nose, though pure in form as it left the brow, and
graceful in curve, ended in flattened and flaring nostrils. Anger
increased this effect at times, and then the face wore an absolutely
furious expression. All the lower part of the face, like the lower
part of the nose, seemed unfinished, as if the clay in the hands of
the divine sculptor had proved insufficient. Between the lower lip and
the chin the space was so short that any one taking La Pechina by the
chin would have rubbed the lip; but the teeth prevented all notice of
this defect. One might almost believe those little bones had souls, so
brilliant were they, so polished, so transparent, so exquisitely
shaped, disclosed as they were by too wide a mouth, curved in lines
that bore resemblance to the fantastic shapes of coral. The shells of
the ears were so transparent to the light that in the sunshine they
were rose-colored. The complexion, though sun-burned, showed a
marvellous delicacy in the texture of the skin. If, as Buffon
declared, love lies in touch, the softness of the girl\'s skin must
have had the penetrating and inciting influence of the fragrance of
daturas. The chest and indeed the whole body was alarmingly thin; but
the feet and hands, of alluring delicacy, showed remarkable nervous
power, and a vigorous organism.
Getting ready for the dinner party (from "A Start in Life") :
Though for two days past Moreau\'s pretty wife had arrayed herself
coquettishly, the prettiest of her toilets had been reserved for this
very Saturday, when, as she felt no doubt, the artist would arrive for
dinner. A pink gown in very narrow stripes, a pink belt with a richly
chased gold buckle, a velvet ribbon and cross at her throat, and
velvet bracelets on her bare arms (Madame de Serizy had handsome arms
and showed them much), together with bronze kid shoes and thread
stockings, gave Madame Moreau all the appearance of an elegant
Parisian. She wore, also, a superb bonnet of Leghorn straw, trimmed
with a bunch of moss roses from Nattier\'s, beneath the spreading sides
of which rippled the curls of her beautiful blond hair.
After ordering a very choice dinner and reviewing the condition of her
rooms, she walked about the grounds, so as to be seen standing near a
flower-bed in the court-yard of the chateau, like the mistress of the
house, on the arrival of the coach from Paris. She held above her head
a charming rose-colored parasol lined with white silk and fringed.
Seeing that Pierrotin merely left Mistigris\'s queer packages with the
concierge, having, apparently, brought no passengers, Estelle retired
disappointed and regretting the trouble of making her useless toilet.
Like many persons who are dressed in their best, she felt incapable of
any other occupation than that of sitting idly in her salon awaiting
the coach from Beaumont, which usually passed about an hour after that
of Pierrotin, though it did not leave Paris till mid-day. She was,
therefore, in her own apartment when the two artists walked up to the
chateau, and were sent by Moreau himself to their rooms where they
made their regulation toilet for dinner. The pair had asked questions
of their guide, the gardener, who told them so much of Moreau\'s beauty
that they felt the necessity of "rigging themselves up" (studio
slang). They, therefore, put on their most superlative suits and then
walked over to the steward\'s lodge, piloted by Jacques Moreau, the
eldest son, a hardy youth, dressed like an English boy in a handsome
jacket with a turned-over collar, who was spending his vacation like a
fish in water on the estate where his father and mother reigned as
aristocrats.
This passage from "The Lily of the Valley" is perhaps just a tad bit too much.
But what can you expect. This was one of the few paragraphs extracted
when I set the extraction threshhold on hte computer program used to extract these
descriptions to 20 keywords (pretty high) regarding clothing and the body.
More extensive physical descriptions of characters is bound to be correlated with
heightened emotional states:
If you have understood this history of my early life you will guess
the feelings which now welled up within me. My eyes rested suddenly on
white, rounded shoulders where I would fain have laid my head,--
shoulders faintly rosy, which seemed to blush as if uncovered for the
first time; modest shoulders, that possessed a soul, and reflected
light from their satin surface as from a silken texture. These
shoulders were parted by a line along which my eyes wandered. I raised
myself to see the bust and was spell-bound by the beauty of the bosom,
chastely covered with gauze, where blue-veined globes of perfect
outline were softly hidden in waves of lace. The slightest details of
the head were each and all enchantments which awakened infinite
delights within me; the brilliancy of the hair laid smoothly above a
neck as soft and velvety as a child\'s, the white lines drawn by the
comb where my imagination ran as along a dewy path,--all these things
put me, as it were, beside myself. Glancing round to be sure that no
one saw me, I threw myself upon those shoulders as a child upon the
breast of its mother, kissing them as I laid my head there. The woman
uttered a piercing cry, which the noise of the music drowned; she
turned, saw me, and exclaimed, "Monsieur!" Ah! had she said, "My
little lad, what possesses you?" I might have killed her; but at the
word "Monsieur!" hot tears fell from my eyes. I was petrified by a
glance of saintly anger, by a noble face crowned with a diadem of
golden hair in harmony with the shoulders I adored. The crimson of
offended modesty glowed on her cheeks, though already it was appeased
by the pardoning instinct of a woman who comprehends a frenzy which
she inspires, and divines the infinite adoration of those repentant
tears. She moved away with the step and carriage of a queen.
Another woman from "Lily of the Valley" :
I can sketch for you the leading features which all eyes saw in Madame
de Mortsauf; but no drawing, however correct, no color, however warm,
can represent her to you. Her face was of those that require the
unattainable artist, whose hand can paint the reflection of inward
fires and render that luminous vapor which defies science and is not
revealable by language--but which a lover sees. Her soft, fair hair
often caused her much suffering, no doubt through sudden rushes of
blood to the head. Her brow, round and prominent like that of Joconda,
teemed with unuttered thoughts, restrained feelings--flowers drowning
in bitter waters. The eyes, of a green tinge flecked with brown, were
always wan; but if her children were in question, or if some keen
condition of joy or suffering (rare in the lives of all resigned
women) seized her, those eyes sent forth a subtile gleam as if from
fires that were consuming her,--the gleam that wrung the tears from
mine when she covered me with her contempt, and which sufficed to
lower the boldest eyelid. A Grecian nose, designed it might be by
Phidias, and united by its double arch to lips that were gracefully
curved, spiritualized the face, which was oval with a skin of the
texture of a white camellia colored with soft rose-tints upon the
cheeks. Her plumpness did not detract from the grace of her figure nor
from the rounded outlines which made her shape beautiful though well
developed. You will understand the character of this perfection when I
say that where the dazzling treasures which had so fascinated me
joined the arm there was no crease or wrinkle. No hollow disfigured
the base of her head, like those which make the necks of some women
resemble trunks of trees; her muscles were not harshly defined, and
everywhere the lines were rounded into curves as fugitive to the eye
as to the pencil. A soft down faintly showed upon her cheeks and on
the outline of her throat, catching the light which made it silken.
Her little ears, perfect in shape, were, as she said herself, the ears
of a mother and a slave. In after days, when our hearts were one, she
would say to me, "Here comes Monsieur de Mortsauf"; and she was right,
though I, whose hearing is remarkably acute, could hear nothing.
A woman at fifteen (circa early nineteenth century):
The latter, just fifteen, had come victoriously out of her struggle
with anaemia, and was now a woman. She had grown tall; the Bengal
roses were blooming in her once sallow cheeks. She had lost the
unconcern of a child who looks every one in the face, and now dropped
her eyes; her movements were slow and infrequent, like those of her
mother; her figure was slim, but the gracefulness of the bust was
already developing; already an instinct of coquetry had smoothed the
magnificent black hair which lay in bands upon her Spanish brow. She
was like those pretty statuettes of the Middle Ages, so delicate in
outline, so slender in form that the eye as it seizes their charm
fears to break them. Health, the fruit of untold efforts, had made her
cheeks as velvety as a peach and given to her throat the silken down
which, like her mother\'s, caught the light. She was to live! God had
written it, dear bud of the loveliest of human flowers, on the long
lashes of her eyelids, on the curve of those shoulders which gave
promise of a development as superb as her mother\'s! This brown young
girl, erect as a poplar, contrasted with Jacques, a fragile youth of
seventeen, whose head had grown immensely, causing anxiety by the
rapid expansion of the forehead, while his feverish, weary eyes were
in keeping with a voice that was deep and sonorous. The voice gave
forth too strong a volume of tone, the eye too many thoughts. It was
Henriette\'s intellect and soul and heart that were here devouring with
swift flames a body without stamina; for Jacques had the milk-white
skin and high color which characterize young English women doomed
sooner or later to the consumptive curse,--an appearance of health
that deceives the eye. Following a sign by which Henriette, after
showing me Madeleine, made me look at Jacques drawing geometrical
figures and algebraic calculations on a board before the Abbe Dominis,
I shivered at the sight of death hidden beneath the roses, and was
thankful for the self-deception of his mother.
A portrait of a dieing woman (from "A Lily of the Valley"):
We reached the door of the chamber and the abbe opened it. I then saw
Henriette, dressed in white, sitting on her little sofa which was
placed before the fireplace, on which were two vases filled with
flowers; flowers were also on a table near the window. The expression
of the abbe\'s face, which was that of amazement at the change in the
room, now restored to its former state, showing me that the dying
woman had sent away the repulsive preparations which surround a sick-
bed. She had spent the last waning strength of fever in decorating her
room to receive him whom in that final hour she loved above all things
else. Surrounded by clouds of lace, her shrunken face, which had the
greenish pallor of a magnolia flower as it opens, resembled the first
outline of a cherished head drawn in chalks upon the yellow canvas of
a portrait. To feel how deeply the vulture\'s talons now buried
themselves in my heart, imagine the eyes of that outlined face
finished and full of life,--hollow eyes which shone with a brilliancy
unusual in a dying person. The calm majesty given to her in the past
by her constant victory over sorrow was there no longer. Her forehead,
the only part of her face which still kept its beautiful proportions,
wore an expression of aggressive will and covert threats. In spite of
the waxy texture of her elongated face, inward fires were issuing from
it like the fluid mist which seems to flame above the fields of a hot
day. Her hollow temples, her sunken cheeks showed the interior
formation of the face, and the smile upon her whitened lips vaguely
resembled the grin of death. Her robe, which was folded across her
breast, showed the emaciation of her beautiful figure. The expression
of her head said plainly that she knew she was changed, and that the
thought filled her with bitterness. She was no longer the arch
Henriette, nor the sublime and saintly Madame de Mortsauf, but the
nameless something of Bossuet struggling against annihilation, driven
to the selfish battle of life against death by hunger and balked
desire. I took her hand, which was dry and burning, to kiss it, as I
seated myself beside her. She guessed my sorrowful surprise from the
very effort that I made to hide it. Her discolored lips drew up from
her famished teeth trying to form a smile,--the forced smile with
which we strive to hide either the irony of vengeance, the expectation
of pleasure, the intoxication of our souls, or the fury of
disappointment.
An older unmarried woman (from "The Vicar of Tours");
Now it is impossible for a woman who is perpetually at war with
herself and living in contradiction to her true life, to leave others
in peace or refrain from envying their happines. The whole range of
these sad truths could be read in the dulled gray eyes of Mademoiselle
Gamard; the dark circles that surrounded those eyes told of the inward
conflicts of her solitary life. All the wrinkles on her face were in
straight lines. The structure of her forehead and cheeks was rigid and
prominent. She allowed, with apparent indifference, certain scattered
hairs, once brown, to grow upon her chin. Her thin lips scarcely
covered teeth that were too long, though still quite white. Her
complexion was dark, and her hair, originally black, had turned gray
from frightful headaches,--a misfortune which obliged her to wear a
false front. Not knowing how to put it on so as to conceal the
junction between the real and the false, there were often little gaps
between the border of her cap and the black string with which this
semi-wig (always badly curled) was fastened to her head. Her gown,
silk in summer, merino in winter, and always brown in color, was
invariably rather tight for her angular figure and thin arms. Her
collar, limp and bent, exposed too much the red skin of a neck which
was ribbed like an oak-leaf in winter seen in the light. Her origin
explains to some extent the defects of her conformation. She was the
daughter of a wood-merchant, a peasant, who had risen from the ranks.
She might have been plump at eighteen, but no trace remained of the
fair complexion and pretty color of which she was wont to boast. The
tones of her flesh had taken the pallid tints so often seen in
"devotes." Her aquiline nose was the feature that chiefly proclaimed
the despotism of her nature, and the flat shape of her forehead the
narrowness of her mind. Her movements had an odd abruptness which
precluded all grace; the mere motion with which she twitched her
handkerchief from her bag and blew her nose with a loud noise would
have shown her character and habits to a keen observer. Being rather
tall, she held herself very erect, and justified the remark of a
naturalist who once explained the peculiar gait of old maids by
declaring that their joints were consolidating. When she walked her
movements were not equally distributed over her whole person, as they
are in other women, producing those graceful undulations which are so
attractive. She moved, so to speak, in a single block, seeming to
advance at each step like the statue of the Commendatore. When she
felt in good humour she was apt, like other old maids, to tell of the
chances she had had to marry, and of her fortunate discovery in time
of the want of means of her lovers,--proving, unconsciously, that her
worldly judgment was better than her heart.
(
geocities.com/soho/square) (
geocities.com/soho)