Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/408

 twenty-five are positively known to have been taken off by her. She managed wonderfully to use two innocent women to cover these crimes and to be suspected instead of herself. At the place of execution she exonerated them.

Charlotte Corday's hair "seemed black when fastened in a large mass around her head: it seemed gold-colored at the points of the tresses, like the ear of corn,—deeper and more lustrous than the wheat-stalk in the sunlight." Her variable eyes were "blue when she reflected, almost black when called into animated play." Her skin had the wholesome and marbled whiteness of perfect health.

Rebecca Sharp had "a knack of adopting a demure ingénue air, under which she was most dangerous. She said the wickedest things with the most simple, unaffected air when in this mood, and would take care artlessly to apologize for her blunders, so that all the world should know that she had made them."

Ninon de l'Enclos, and Madame de Chevreuse, the famous conspirator who baffled two cardinals with an admirable mixture of pluck and cunning, were pure blondes. Such women court their objects and pursue their schemes in a manifold and sprightly fashion: their magnetic power flits to and fro, many-colored, subtle, silent, swift as an aurora. They have complicated the policy of courts and sown dissension in cabinets. They misrepresent a statesman's secrets, set one clique against another, stir about in society till it becomes one stupendous snarl; and perhaps you cannot point to a spot