Each blonde head around the table (alas, only blond-haired they!) betrayed an almost imperceptible movement of disappointment. For them clearly the tale had henceforth lost something of its interest.

‘She had the ebony locks of Night,’ resumed Ravila, ‘but crowning the face of Aurora, for indeed her face glowed with a rosy freshness of dawn, as dazzling as rare, that had triumphantly resisted years of Paris life with its hot rooms and artificial light, that burns up so many roses in the flames of its candelabra. Her roses seemed but to win a richer hue, so brilliant was the carmine that mantled on cheek and lip! Indeed, this twofold radiance accorded well with the ruby she always wore on her forehead (the frontlet was still in fashion in those days), which, in combination with her flashing eyes, whose very brilliancy made it impossible to distinguish their colour, formed a triangle, as it were, of three bright jewels in her face! Tall, but robust, and even majestic in figure, cut out for the helpmate of a colonel of dragoons—her husband at that time was only a major in the Light Horse—she enjoyed, for all her fine ladyhood, a peasant woman’s vigorous health, who drinks in the sun at every pore. And she had all the heat and ardour of the sun in her veins, and in her very soul as well—ever present, and ever ready.…But—and this was the strange part of it—this being, so strong and simple and unspoiled, as generous and as pure as the red blood that mantled in her cheeks and dyed her rosy arms, was—can you credit it?—maladroit and awkward in a lover’s arms.…’

Here one or two fair auditors dropped their eyes, only to raise them again directly with a look of demure mischief in their depths.…

‘Yes! awkward in this respect as she was reckless in her regard for appearances,’ continued Ravila, and vouchsafed no further information on this delicate point. ‘In fact, the man who loved her had to be incessantly teaching her two lessons, neither of which she ever really learnt—not to affront needlessly public opinion, a foe that is always under arms and always merciless, and to practise in the intimacy of private life those all-important acts of love that guard passion from dying of satiety. Love she had in abundance, but the art and mystery of its skilled exponents were beyond her ken.…She was the antipodes of most women, who possess the latter qualifications to perfection, but of the other not a whit. Now to comprehend and apply the cunning maxims of the Il Principe, you must be a Borgia to begin with. Borgia comes first, Machiavelli second; one is the poet, the other the critic. No Borgia was she, but just a good woman in love, as simple-minded, with all her monumental beauty, as the little maid in the rustic picture who tries to take up a handful of spring water from the fountain to quench her thirst, but in her trembling haste lets it trickle away every drop between her fingers, and stands there an image of embarrassment and confusion.…

‘Yet in a way the contrast was piquant and almost delightful between this embarrassed awkwardness and the grand, passion-fraught personality of the woman, who would have deceived the most acute observer when seen in society—who knew love, and even love’s bliss, but had not the faculty to pay back half of what she received. Only, unfortunately, I was not artist enough to be content with this mere delight of contrast; hence now and again displays on her part of disquiet, jealousy, and even violence. But all this jealousy, disquiet, violence, was swallowed up in the inexhaustible kindness of her heart at the first sign of pain she thought she had inflicted—as awkward at wounding as she was at caressing! Tigress of an unknown species, she fondly imagined she had claws, but lo! when she would show them, none were to be found within the sheath of her beautiful velvet paws. Her very scratches were velvet- soft!’

‘What is the man driving at?’ whispered the Comtesse de Chiffrevas to her neighbour. ‘This surely cannot be Don Juan’s proudest triumph!’

All these complex natures could not understand such simplicity, and remained incredulous.

‘Thus we lived,’ Ravila went on, ‘on terms of friendship, now and then interrupted by storms, yet never shipwrecked, a friendship that, in the little village they call Paris, was a mystery to none.…The marquise—she was a marquise…’