I have here, lying beside me, on the snow-white ground of vellum, the very _silhouette_ which Matthieu had taken of her with the scissors. My correspondent will have me depict Clotilda as uncommonly beautiful. Otherwise, he says, a hundred things in this history are incomprehensible; and therefore he sends me (because he cannot trust my fancy) at least her profile. And that is to be, even during my writing, steadily looked at all the time,--so much the more, as it might seem actually to have been cut from the very face[46] of another loveliest female angel that ever flew out of an unknown paradise down to this earth: I mean the Fräulein von * * *, at present maid-of-honor in Scheerau; I am not sure whether all my readers know her. Victor felt as if his blood had been driven outward, and with warm touches described its circles on the external skin. At last Clotilda's cold eye, of which not the intoxicated pride of beauty, but the sober, retiring pride of innocence belonging only to the female sex, was mistress, and her nose, which betrayed too much reflectiveness, brought his new Adam to his legs again, upon which the old Adam had already set himself up. He congratulated himself that he was Flamin's friend, and consequently had some claims upon her attention and her society. Nevertheless he continued to feel all the time as if everything she did occurred now for the first time in the world; and he watched her as one does a man who has been operated on for blindness from his birth, or an Omai,[47] or a Li-Bu. He kept thinking, "How could sitting down ever become her,--or the handing of a fruit-dish, or the eating of a cherry, or stooping down to read a note?" I am a still worse ninny beside the above-mentioned court dame.