ABSTRACT
Belle was driven, as we saw in regard to her exhibitionism, by her preoccupation with being lovely. What caught my attention was that “lovely” was not, for her, an adjective describing behavior that revealed a sense of herself but rather was a noun, a specific “substance” within, that was drawn on when necessary and could be depleted by too many withdrawals or with age. Her “lovely” was a commodity. On rising in the morning, she had to put on her “lovely”; she could only hope as the day unfolded that if she had “lovely” then she was lovely.
