She kept her exquisite tint and her lovely eyes unspoiled by the endless late hours and the incessant excitations in which women of the _monde où l'on s'amuse_ lose their youth in a year or two. She ate very simply, drank little but water, rode or drove no matter what weather, refused forty-nine out of fifty of all the invitations she received, seldom or never made any house visits, and spent many hours in perfect repose.
'Why should you go and stay in other people's houses?' she always said to her English friends, in whom this mania is more rampant than amongst any other nationality. 'Another person's house is hardly better than an hotel; indeed, very often it is worse. If you don't like the dinner-hour, you cannot change it; if you are given slow horses, you cannot complain; if you dislike your rooms, you cannot alter them; if you think the _chef_ a bad one, you cannot say so; if you find all the house party bore you, you cannot get rid of them. You must pretend to eat all day long; you must pretend to feel amiable from noon to midnight; you must have all kinds of plans made for you, and submit to them; you can never read but in your own room, and, generally speaking, there is nothing in the library--if it be an English library--except Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Mr. Darwin. I cannot imagine how any reasonable being subjects herself to such a martyrdom only because somebody else finds their country place dull without people.'
She had also ingeniously established a reputation for very delicate health, which she found beyond anything useful to spare her from being bored, and to excuse her absence from any gathering which did not specially attract her.
'I have a _santé de fer_,' she said once to a friend, 'but happily I look very fragile, and physicians, if they think you wish it, will always promise you angina pectoris or tubercles on your lungs. I have an enchanting doctor in Paris--you know him, de Thiviers--he is very famous; he will shake his head over me as if I were doomed to die in ten minutes, and he frightens Platon out of his wits--he gets a great many rouleaux at the end of the season--and he and I look as grave as the two augurs, though, like the augurs, we are both longing to laugh. It is so useful to be thought very delicate, you have an excuse for everything. If at the last moment you don't wish to go anywhere, nobody can say anything if it be your health that gives way. They would never forgive me my continual absence from the Court at Petersburg, and I certainly should not receive my perpetual passport, if they did not sincerely believe in the tubercles which de Thiviers has so obligingly found for me. Do go to de Thiviers if you are quite well and want to be ill; he understands all that sort of thing so well, and he never betrays you. He has convinced Platon that I am _poitrinaire_.'