Victor Hugo - The Man Who Laughs - Cosmopolitan University 2

Josiana was "the flesh." Nothing could be more resplendent. She was very
tall--too tall. Her hair was of that tinge which might be called red
gold. She was plump, fresh, strong, and rosy, with immense boldness and
wit. She had eyes which were too intelligible. She had neither lovers
nor chastity. She walled herself round with pride. Men! oh, fie! a god
only would be worthy of her, or a monster. If virtue consists in the
protection of an inaccessible position, Josiana possessed all possible
virtue, but without any innocence. She disdained intrigues; but she
would not have been displeased had she been supposed to have engaged in
some, provided that the objects were uncommon, and proportioned to the
merits of one so highly placed. She thought little of her reputation,
but much of her glory. To appear yielding, and to be unapproachable, is
perfection. Josiana felt herself majestic and material. Hers was a
cumbrous beauty. She usurped rather than charmed. She trod upon hearts.
She was earthly. She would have been as much astonished at being proved
to have a soul in her bosom as wings on her back. She discoursed on
Locke; she was polite; she was suspected of knowing Arabic.
To be "the flesh" and to be woman are two different things. Where a
woman is vulnerable, on the side of pity, for instance, which so readily
turns to love, Josiana was not. Not that she was unfeeling. The ancient
comparison of flesh to marble is absolutely false. The beauty of flesh
consists in not being marble: its beauty is to palpitate, to tremble, to
blush, to bleed, to have firmness without hardness, to be white without
being cold, to have its sensations and its infirmities; its beauty is to
be life, and marble is death.
Flesh, when it attains a certain degree of beauty, has almost a claim to
the right of nudity; it conceals itself in its own dazzling charms as in
a veil. He who might have looked upon Josiana nude would have perceived
her outlines only through a surrounding glory. She would have shown
herself without hesitation to a satyr or a eunuch. She had the
self-possession of a goddess. To have made her nudity a torment, ever
eluding a pursuing Tantalus, would have been an amusement to her.
The king had made her a duchess, and Jupiter a Nereid--a double
irradiation of which the strange, brightness of this creature was
composed. In admiring her you felt yourself becoming a pagan and a
lackey. Her origin had been bastardy and the ocean. She appeared to have
emerged from the foam. From the stream had risen the first jet of her
destiny; but the spring was royal. In her there was something of the
wave, of chance, of the patrician, and of the tempest. She was well read
and accomplished. Never had a passion approached her, yet she had
sounded them all. She had a disgust for realizations, and at the same
time a taste for them. If she had stabbed herself, it would, like
Lucretia, not have been until afterwards. She was a virgin stained with
every defilement in its visionary stage. She was a possible Astarte in a
real Diana. She was, in the insolence of high birth, tempting and
inaccessible. Nevertheless, she might find it amusing to plan a fall for
herself. She dwelt in a halo of glory, half wishing to descend from it,
and perhaps feeling curious to know what a fall was like. She was a
little too heavy for her cloud. To err is a diversion. Princely
unconstraint has the privilege of experiment, and what is frailty in a
plebeian is only frolic in a duchess. Josiana was in everything--in
birth, in beauty, in irony, in brilliancy--almost a queen. She had felt
a moment's enthusiasm for Louis de Bouffles, who used to break
horseshoes between his fingers. She regretted that Hercules was dead.