“She was a tall, meagre woman of a certain age (that is to say on the wrong side of sixty). Her face bore the remains of beauty, [but injured by] a quantity of glaring rouge. Her dress was always simple in its materials and delicately clean. She meant the fashion to be English, I believe,—at least she used often to say, ‘me voilà mise à l’Anglaise’; but as neither herself nor her faithful _femme de chambre_ could or would condescend to seek for patterns from _les grosses bourgeoises de ce Londres là bas_ they constantly relapsed into the old French shapes.... She used to relate the story of her escape from France, and accounted herself the most fortunate of women for having, in company with her faithful _femme de chambre_, at last contrived to reach England with jewels enough concealed about their persons to secure them a modest competence. No small part of her good fortune was the vicinity of her old friend the Marquis de L., a little thin, withered old man, with a face puckered with wrinkles, and a prodigious volubility of tongue. This gentleman had been madame’s devoted beau for the last forty years.... They could not exist without an interchange of looks and sentiments, a mental intelligence, a gentle gallantry on the one side and a languishing listening on the other, which long habit had rendered as necessary to both as their snuff-box or their coffee. “The next person in importance to the duchess was Madame de V., sister to the marquis. Her husband, who had acted in a diplomatic capacity in the stormy days preceding the Revolution, still maintained his station at the exiled court, and was at the moment of which I write employed on a secret embassy to an unnamed potentate.... In the dearth of Bourbon news this mysterious mission excited a lively and animated curiosity amongst these sprightly people. “In person Madame de V. was quite a contrast to the duchess; short, very crooked, with the sharp, odd-looking face and keen eye that so often accompany deformity. She [used] a quantity of rouge and finery, mingling [together] ribands, feathers and beads of all the colours of the rainbow. She was on excellent terms with all who knew her, and was also on the best terms with herself, in spite of the looking-glass, whose testimony indeed was so positively contradicted by certain couplets and acrostics addressed to her by M. le Comte de C., and the chevalier des I., the poets of the party, that to believe one uncivil dumb thing against two witnesses of such undoubted honour would have been a breach of politeness of which madame was incapable.