We are taking portraits now; we shall be allowed, therefore, we hope, to sketch the two last of this chapter. The one who was leaning in the chair—that is to say, the joyous, laughing one—was a beautiful girl of from eighteen to twenty, with 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 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 incendiary as to cause Madame 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.