[Pg 56] small-pox, and thereby, if you will, quite ugly. There he is, at the end of a week, in love with the ugly one--and this week he employs in effacing her ugliness with his memories; and with a very pardonable coquetry the lesser beauty did not fail to help him in the operation with a slight whip-up of the pulse.[2] A man meets a woman and is offended by her ugliness; soon, if she is unpretentious, her expression makes him forget the defects of her features; he finds her amiable--he conceives that one could love her. A week later he has hopes; another week and they are taken from him; another and he's mad. [1] Beauty is only the promise of happiness. The happiness of a Greek was different to that of a Frenchman of 1822. See the eyes of the Medici Venus and compare them with the eyes of the Magdalen of Pordenone (in the possession of M. de Sommariva.) [2] If one is sure of the love of a woman, one examines to see if she is more or less beautiful; if one is uncertain of her heart, there is no time to think of her face. [Pg 57] CHAPTER XVIII LIMITATIONS OF BEAUTY An analogy is to be seen at the theatre in the reception of the public's favourite actors: the spectators are no longer conscious of the beauty or ugliness which the actors have in reality. Lekain, for all his remarkable ugliness, had a harvest of broken hearts--Garrick also. There are several reasons for this; the principal being that it was no longer the actual beauty of their features or their ways which people saw, but emphatically that which imagination was long since used to lend them, as a return for, and in memory of, all the pleasure they had given it. Why, take a comedian--his face alone raises a laugh as he first walks on. A girl going for the first time to the Français would perhaps feel some antipathy to Lekain during the first scene; but soon he was making her weep or shiver--and how resist him as Tancrède[1] or Orosmane? If his ugliness were still a little visible to her eyes, the fervour of an entire audience, and the nervous effect produced upon a young heart,[2] soon managed to eclipse [Pg 58] it. If anything was still heard about his ugliness, it was mere talk; but not a word of it--Lekain's lady enthusiasts could be heard to exclaim "He's lovely!" Remember that beauty is the expression of character, or, put differently, of moral habits, and that consequently it is exempt from all passion. Now it is passion that we want. Beauty can only supply us with probabilities about a woman, and probabilities, moreover, based on her capacity for self-possession; while the glances of your mistress with her small-pox scars are a delightful reality, which destroys all the probabilities in the world. [1] See Madame de Staël in _Delphine_, I think; there you have the artifice of plain women.