Instead of doing so at once after dinner, she was suddenly overcome with fatigue and allowed her head with its beautiful fair curls to drop on the back of the sofa, her feet being supported in front of her by a stool.

The warmth of the fire had dried the mud on her habit and on her boots.

Her doeskin gloves and the little peaked cap with its green veil and a whip lay on the table where she had flung them.

She looked sometimes at the old Boule clock which stood on the mantelshelf between the candelabra, perhaps to judge if her four conspirators were asleep, and sometimes at the card-table in front of the fire where Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre, the cure of Cinq-Cygne, and his sister were playing a game of boston.
Even if these personages were not embedded in this drama, their portraits would have the merit of representing one of the aspects of the aristocracy after its overthrow in 1793.

From this point of view, a sketch of the salon at Cinq-Cygne has the raciness of history seen in dishabille.
Monsieur d'Hauteserre, then fifty-two years of age, tall, spare, high-colored, and robust in health, would have seemed the embodiment of vigor if it were not for a pair of porcelain blue eyes, the glance of which denoted the most absolute simplicity.