BUGLOSS. 
83 
This taste prevails alike in the harem and in 
the desert. Duperron relates that a young 
savage, wishing to attract his notice, took by 
stealth a bit of charcoal, which she reduced to 
powder in a corner, rubbed her cheeks with it, 
and then came back with a look of triumph, as 
if this application had rendered her beauty irre¬ 
sistible. 
Castellan, in his Letters on Greece, thus de¬ 
scribes a Greek princess, whose portrait he 
painted at Constantinople. “She was not,” 
he says, “ the ideal beauty I had pictured to 
myself. Her dark, prominent eyes were as bright 
as diamonds, but her blackened eyelashes spoiled 
their expression. Her eyebrows, joined by a 
line of paint, gave a kind of harshness to her 
look. Her small mouth and deep-coloured lips 
might be embellished with smiles, but I never 
had the pleasure to see them. Her cheeks were 
covered with a very dark rouge, and her face 
was disfigured by crescent-shaped patches. Add 
to this the lifelessness of her demeanour and 
the freezing gravity of her physiognomy, and 
you would suppose that I had been depicting an 
Italian Madonna.” 
