‘Don’t you admire her, then?’ said she. ‘The lady is very pretty, indeed,’ said I. ‘The heart led,’ interrupted the abbé suddenly, as he touched my foot beneath the table--‘play a heart.’ Close beside my chair, and leaning over my cards, stood Mademoiselle Laura herself at the moment. ‘You have no heart,’ said she, in English, and with a singular expression on the words, while her downcast eye shot a glance--one glance--through me. ‘Yes, but I have though,’ said I, discovering a card that lay concealed behind another; ‘it only requires a little looking for.’ ‘Not worth the trouble, perhaps,’ said she, with a toss of her head, as I threw the deuce upon the table; and before I could reply she was gone. ‘I think her much prettier when she looks saucy,’ said the baronne, as if to imply that the air of pique assumed was a mere piece of acting got up for effect. I see it all, said I to myself. Foreign women can never forgive English for being so much their superior in beauty and loveliness. Meanwhile our game came to a close, and we gathered around the buffet. There we found the old colonel, with a large silver tankard of mulled wine, holding forth over some campaigning exploit, to which no one listened for more than a second or two--and thus the whole room became joint-stock hearers of his story. Laura stood eating her ice with the Comte d’Espagne, the black-whiskered cavalier already mentioned, beside her. The Americans were prosing away about Jefferson and Adams; the Belgians talked agriculture and genealogy; and the French collecting into a group of their own, in which nearly all the pretty women joined, discoursed the ballet, the Chambre, the court, the coulisses, the last mode, and the last murder, and all in the same mirthful and lively tone. And truly, let people condemn as they will this superficial style of conversation, there is none equal to it; it avoids the prosaic flatness of German, and the monotonous pertinacity of English, which seems more to partake of the nature of discussion than dialogue. French chit-chat takes a wider range--anecdotic, illustrative, and discursive by turns; it deems nothing too light, nothing too weighty for its subject; it is a gay butterfly, now floating with gilded wings above you, now tremulously perched upon a leaf below, now sparkling in the sunbeam, now loitering in the shade; embodying not only thought, but expression, it charms by its style as well as by its matter. The language, too, suggests shades and nuances of colouring that exist not in other tongues; you can give to your canvas the precise tint you wish, for when mystery would prove a merit, the equivoque is there ready to your hand--meaning so much, yet asserting so little. For my part I should make my will in English; but I’d rather make love in French.