Jonathan

“She was an agreeable country lady, very ugly; with so much goodness in her blind eye, so much goodness in her good eye, so much goodness in her moustache, in her snuff-taking nose, in her sagging cheeks, in her black-lipped mouth, that she was frightfully ugly. It was an ugliness made of all that sacrifice, of all that martyrdom which constitutes real goodness. In the photograph that I saw in the bedroom where she was holding in her hand the forefinger of the shepherd Massot, all rigged out for the wedding, she was beautiful and fresh and seemingly inflated with an artless loveliness. That creature had to be gradually broken, burned, twisted, kneaded; the eye blinded, the body made ungainly, be cooked in the oven of goodness like a brick or a pot; it had to forget everything but that little red fruit that was the heart. She had fully succeeded.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy