splendid, from eyes which sparkled beneath strongly-marked
brows, and particularly from her teeth, which seemed to
shine like pearls between her red coral lips. Her every
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Dumas, Alexandre – Ten Years Later
movement seemed the accent of a sunny nature, she did not
walk — she bounded.
The other, she who was writing, looked at her turbulent
companion with an eye as limpid, as pure, and as blue as the
azure of the day. Her hair, of a shaded fairness, arranged
with exquisite taste, fell in silky curls over her lovely
mantling cheeks; she passed across the paper a delicate
hand, whose thinness announced her extreme youth. At each
burst of laughter that proceeded from her friend, she
raised, as if annoyed, her white shoulders in a poetical and
mild manner, but they were wanting in that richfulness of
mold which was likewise to be wished in her arms and hands.
“Montalais! Montalais!” said she at length, in a voice soft
and caressing as a melody, “you laugh too loud — you laugh
like a man! You will not only draw the attention of
messieurs the guards, but you will not hear Madame’s bell
when Madame rings.”
This admonition neither made the young girl called Montalais
cease to laugh and gesticulate. She only replied: “Louise,
you do not speak as you think, my dear; you know that
messieurs the guards, as you call them, have only just
commenced their sleep, and that a cannon would not waken
them; you know that Madame’s bell can be heard at the bridge
of Blois, and that consequently I shall hear it when my
services are required by Madame. What annoys you, my child,
is that I laugh while you are writing; and what you are
afraid of is that Madame de Saint-Remy, your mother, should
come up here, as she does sometimes when we laugh too loud,
that she should surprise us, and that she should see that
enormous sheet of paper upon which, in a quarter of an hour,
you have only traced the words Monsieur Raoul. Now, you are
right, my dear Louise, because after these words, `Monsieur
Raoul,’ others may be put so significant and so incendiary
as to cause Madame de Saint-Remy to burst out into fire and
flames! Hein! is not that true now? — say.”
And Montalais redoubled her laughter and noisy provocations.
The fair girl at length became quite angry; she tore the
sheet of paper on which, in fact, the words “Monsieur Raoul”
were written in good characters, and crushing the paper in
her trembling hands, she threw it out of the window.
“There! there!” said Mademoiselle de Montalais; “there is
our little lamb, our gentle dove, angry! Don’t be afraid,
Louise — Madame de Saint-Remy will not come; and if she
should, you know I have a quick ear. Besides, what can be
more permissible than to write to an old friend of twelve
years’ standing, particularly when the letter begins with
the words `Monsieur Raoul’?”
“It is all very well — I will not write to him at all,”
said the young girl.
“Ah, ah! in good sooth, Montalais is properly punished,”
cried the jeering brunette, still laughing. “Come, come! let
us try another sheet of paper, and finish our dispatch
off-hand. Good! there is the bell ringing now. By my faith,
so much the worse! Madame must wait, or else do without her
first maid of honor this morning.”
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Dumas, Alexandre – Ten Years Later
A bell, in fact, did ring; it announced that Madame had
finished her toilette, and waited for Monsieur to give her
his hand, and conduct her from the salon to the refectory.
This formality being accomplished with great ceremony, the
husband and wife breakfasted, and then separated till the
hour of dinner, invariably fixed at two o’clock.
The sound of this bell caused a door to be opened in the
offices on the left hand of the court, from which filed two
maitres d’hotel followed by eight scullions bearing a kind
of hand-barrow loaded with dishes under silver covers.
One of the maitres d’hotel, the first in rank, touched one
of the guards, who was snoring on his bench, slightly with