She seemed fatigued and depressed. But her attitude was modest and her expression serene. She was inhaling the perfume of her bouquet of cyclamen and playing idly with her fan. Michel gazed at her a long time before he heard, or, at least, attached a meaning to the words she was saying. She seemed to him lovelier than any of the beauties he had been scrutinizing so closely, and he could not understand the unmixed, boundless admiration which she aroused in him. He strove in vain to examine her features in detail and analyze her charms; he could not succeed. She seemed to be floating in a magic fluid which protected her from being studied like other women. From time to time, thinking that he understood her, he closed his eyes and tried to sketch her portrait in his memory, to draw her in imagination, in strokes of flame, on the black veil which he spread before his own eyes by lowering his lids. But he saw naught but confused lines, and could not conjure up any distinct face. He was compelled to reopen his eyes in haste and gaze at her with anxiety, with intense delight, and above all, with surprise. For there was a something indescribable about her. She was perfectly natural; of all the women Michel had seen, she alone seemed to have no thought of herself; she had assumed no studied air or manner; she did not know, or did not choose to know, what people thought of her, what they felt as they looked at her; she had the tranquillity of a mind disassociated from all human things, and the entire freedom from constraint that she might have had in absolute solitude. And yet she was arrayed like a genuine princess; she was giving a ball, she displayed her magnificence, she played her rôle of a great lady and of a woman of the world, like any other, to all appearance. Why then that madonna-like air, that inward meditation, or that rapt contemplation of a soul above human vanities? She was a living enigma to the young artist's restless imagination. Something still more strange perplexed him beyond measure; and that was that it seemed to him that he had not seen her that day for the first time. Where could he have seen her before? In vain did he rack his memory. When he arrived at Catania her very name was strange to him. A person of such exalted rank, and so remarkable by reason of her wealth, her beauty, and her reputation for virtue, could not have come to Rome _incognito_. Michel cudgelled his brain. He could recall no occasion when he could have seen her; especially as when he looked at her, he had a feeling, not that he had known her slightly, but that he had known her intimately and for a long time, ever since he was born.