I have forgotten to tell you that the lines of her face were not regular, and that her profile was not that of a statue. Phidias would, perhaps, have refused to make a bust of her; but your Pradier would have begged on his knees for sittings. I must confess, at the risk of destroying your illusions, that she had a dimple in her left cheek, but none in the right; this is contrary to all laws of symmetry. Know, moreover, that her nose was neither straight nor aquiline, but purely retroussé, as French noses are. But that this rendered her less pretty, I will deny, even upon the scaffold. She was as beautiful as Greek statues are; but was entirely different. Beauty cannot be judged by one invariable type, although Plato affirms it. It varies according to times, according to peoples, and according to culture. The Venus de Milo was considered, two thousand years ago, the most beautiful woman of the Archipelago. I do not believe that, in 1856, she would have been considered the prettiest woman in Paris. Take her to a dressmaker's in the Place Vendome, or to a milliner's in the Rue de la Paix, and in these places she would be less of a success than some other women whose features were not so classical, and whose nose was not so straight. One could admire a woman geometrically beautiful, in the days when she was only an object of art destined to please the eyes, without appealing to the mind; a bird of Paradise at whose plumage one looks, without thinking of asking it to sing. A beautiful Athenian was as well-proportioned, as white, and as cold, as the column of a temple. M. Mérinay has shown to me, in a book, that the Ionic column is only a woman, disguised. The portico of the Temple of Erechtée, at the Acropolis at Athens, rests upon four Athenian women of the century of Pericles. The women of to-day are little, winged beings, active, busy, and above all, thoughtful; created, not to hold temples on their heads, but to awaken genius, to engage in work, to animate with courage, and to light the world with the flashes of their wit. What we love in them, and what makes their beauty, is not regularity of features; it is the lively and mobile expression of sentiments, more delicate than ours; it is the radiation of thought around that fragile envelope, which does not suffice to contain it; it is the quick play of a speaking physiognomy. I am not a sculptor, but if I knew how to use the chisel and one gave me a commission to make a statue of our epoch, I swear to you that she would have a dimple in her left cheek, and a retroussé nose.