"Like a beautiful animal you are afraid to caress for fear it should bite"

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part III

Fawn consults with Camperdown, whose word he takes as "gospel," and becomes even more disquieted: Fawn "could not unravel truth quickly, but he could grasp it when it came to him. She was certainly greedy, false, and dishonest . . . Nevertheless he was engaged to marry her!"

Adding to his misery, Fawn's married sister, Mrs. Hittaway, briefs her slow-witted brother on Lizzie's status as the greatest vixen in London.

Uneasyness of Lizzie's visit to her prospective relations: "The Fawn ladies were not good hypocrites . . . and there was a general conviction in the dovecote that an evil thing had fallen upon them."

Lucy Morris confides to Frank her sense of the kind of beauty her childhood friend has become: "she looks like a beautiful animal that you are afraid to careess for fear it should bite you; -- an animal that would be beautiful if its eyes were not so restless, and its teeth so sharp and white."

John Eustace tells Frank of his sense of what Lizzie's marriage to Fawn will bring: "Fawn will be always afraid of her, -- and won't be in the least afraid of us. We shall have to fight him, and he won't fight her."

Frank Greystock debates within himself between marrying for passion -- his love of Lucy -- and marrying for ambition. [The same decision faced by Phineas Finn when he rejects the wealthy Mdm. Gensler]

Lizzie's constitutional falseness: "True love, true friendship, true benevolence, true tenderness, were beautiful to her, -- qualities on which she could descant almost with eloquence; and therefore she was always shamming love and friendship and benevolence and tenderness. She could tell you, with words most appropriate to the subject, how horrible were all shams, and in saying so would not be altogether insincere; -- yet she knew that she herself was ever shamming, and she satisfied herself with shams."

Fawn presents an ultimatum to Lizzie that she either give up the diamonds or he will break-off their marriage. Lizzie spurns both variables, determined to hold Fawn to his promise and, of course, keep the necklace. "She walked on full of fierce courage, -- despising him, but determined that she would marry him." Fawn returns to London, leaving negotiations in his mother's hands.

Fawn lost in perplexity. Trollope speaks of "the short, straight grooves of Lord Fawn's intellect."

Lizzie begins to wear the diamonds regularly in public. At one such fete, Glencora Palliser and her friend Mdm. Max Gensler debate the prospects of the pending marriage of Fawn and Lizzie.

Frank and Lucy are engaged, but he still finds himself torn -- visaulizing the domestic bliss of his marriage to the governess but drawn to his glamorous, wealthy, and dangerous cousin Lizzie.

One of the peculiarities of "The Eustace Diamonds" that Lizzie's son by the late Sir Florian, though fairly often referred to, is never seen -- at least through the first 200 pages. On her railway trip to Scotland and her home at Portray Castle, the iron case bearing the necklace is at center stage, but the heir is never glimpsed.



Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry