I let the Sorbonne and Geneva fight it out between them.

Yet a man must stand by his family, you know." "Ah! if Monsieur could talk to Madame de Maintenon a little! She would convert him." "I would rather talk to Mademoiselle Nanon, but if--" "Oh!" There was an exclamation, a whisk of dark skirts, and the soubrette had disappeared down a side passage.
Along the broad, lighted corridor was gliding a very stately and beautiful lady, tall, graceful, and exceedingly haughty.

She was richly clad in a bodice of gold-coloured camlet and a skirt of gray silk trimmed with gold and silver lace.

A handkerchief of priceless Genoa point half hid and half revealed her beautiful throat, and was fastened in front by a cluster of pearls, while a rope of the same, each one worth a bourgeois' income, was coiled in and out through her luxuriant hair.

The lady was past her first youth, it is true, but the magnificent curves of her queenly figure, the purity of her complexion, the brightness of her deep-lashed blue eyes and the clear regularity of her features enabled her still to claim to be the most handsome as well as the most sharp-tongued woman in the court of France.