She was a woman of about thirty-six or forty, short, thick-set, crooked, her neck sunk between unequal shoulders. They had pulled off her cap, and her hair, of a rather faded yellow, uncombed, tangled, striped with gray, fell over her low and stupid face. She was dressed in a blue frock, like the other prisoners, and carried under her arm a bundle tied up in a miserable, ragged handkerchief. She tried to ward off the threatened blows with her left arm.
Nothing could be more sadly grotesque than the features of this poor creature. It was a ridiculous and hideous face, lengthened to a snout, wrinkled, tanned, and dirty, pierced with nostrils, and small red eyes, squinting and bloodshot; by turns supplicating or angry, she implored and scolded; but they laughed more at her complaints than at her threats. This woman was the butt of the prisoners. One fact alone, however, should have saved her from their bad treatment; she was about to become a mother. But her ugliness and imbecility, and the habit they had of looking upon her as a victim devoted to the general amusement, rendered her persecutors implacable, notwithstanding their ordinary respect for maternity.
Among the most furious of the enemies of Mont Saint Jean (this was the name of the drudge) could have been remarked La Louve—a tall girl of about twenty, active, masculine, with rather regular features; her coarse, black hair was shaded with red; her face was disfigured with pimples; her thick lips were slightly covered with a bluish down; her dark eyebrows, very thick and heavy, met above her large brown eyes; something violent, ferocious, and brutal in her expression, a kind of habitual laugh, which, lifting her upper lip when she was angry, showing her white and scattering teeth, explains her surname of La Louve (She-Wolf). Nevertheless, this face expressed more audacity and insolence than cruelty—in a word, rather vicious than thoroughly bad, this woman was yet susceptible of some good feelings.
"Oh, dear, what have I done to you?" cried Mont Saint Jean. "Why do you treat me so?"
"Because it amuses us. Because you are only fit to be tormented. It is your trade. Look at yourself; you will see you have no right to complain."
"But you know I do not complain until I can't stand it any longer."
"Well, we'll leave you alone if you will tell us why you are called
Mont Saint Jean."
"Yes, yes, tell us that."
"I have told you this-a hundred times. An old soldier, whom I once loved, was called so because he was wounded in the battle of Mont Saint Jean. I took his name. Are you content now? You make me repeat the same things."
"If he looked like you he was a beauty! He must have been one of the invalids."