Thank all the gods-well, thank Apollo, anyway-that Jeremy's body was developing with a great deal more classic symmetry than his face.

A stone's throw from the Louvre Museum, itself a former royal palace, the Palais Royal is a large rectangular building of classic French symmetry commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu in 1629 and designed by his personal architect, Jacques Le Mercier.

At first glance a lovely innocent, as open as his wide eyes, and with the silken pink and whiteness of a girl, but a more penetrating study revealed that this childlike colouring was imposed upon an oval face of classic symmetry and sharp and incisive moulding.

But for all their classic symmetry, they're often the confessions of some desperate, unsavory and unbalanced characters.

Of what she calls her "weird assets," the weirdest is the pronounced S-curve in her spine - the result of a case of scoliosis, which, if it gave her some psychophysical facility for oblique shapes, also required her to work that much harder to achieve the classic symmetries of ballet beauty.

The usual perfect cigar shape was also missing and had been replaced with a a hull that tapered smoothly into a classic swept-back symmetry.

IN exaggerated contrast, the path now leads to the most tended and civilized part of the reserve, where the Bloedels' pale gray stuccoed house, built in the classic symmetry of an 18th-century French chateau by the previous owners, rises straight from the earth without flowers or shrubs to soften its austerity.