brown complexion and brown hair, 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
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 that 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 nor 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