Every experiment which the officiousness of folly could
communicate, or the credulity of ignorance admit, was tried upon me.
Sometimes I was covered with emollients, by which it was expected that
all the scars would be filled, and my cheeks plumped up to their former
smoothness; and sometimes I was punished with artificial excoriations,
in hopes of gaining new graces with a new skin. The cosmetick science
was exhausted upon me; but who can repair the ruins of nature? My mother
was forced to give me rest at last, and abandon me to the fate of a
fallen toast, whose fortune she considered as a hopeless game, no longer
worthy of solicitude or attention.
The condition of a young woman who has never thought or heard of any
other excellence than beauty, and whom the sudden blast of disease
wrinkles in her bloom, is indeed sufficiently calamitous. She is at once
deprived of all that gave her eminence or power; of all that elated her
pride, or animated her activity; all that filled her days with pleasure,
and her nights with hope; all that gave gladness to the present hour, or
brightened her prospects of futurity. It is perhaps not in the power of
a man whose attention has been divided by diversity of pursuits, and who
has not been accustomed to derive from others much of his happiness, to
image to himself such helpless destitution, such dismal inanity.
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