elapsed as soon as his good
angel ceased speaking. Full mournful and significant was that
spectacle! Not the less so because, both for the aristocracy and the
honest bourgeoisie of Labassecour, its peculiarity seemed to be wholly
invisible: I could not discover that one soul present was either struck
or touched.

With the King and Queen had entered their court, comprising two or
three foreign ambassadors; and with them came the elite of the
foreigners then resident in Villette. These took possession of the
crimson benches; the ladies were seated; most of the men remained
standing: their sable rank, lining the background, looked like a dark
foil to the splendour displayed in front. Nor was this splendour
without varying light and shade and gradation: the middle distance was
filled with matrons in velvets and satins, in plumes and gems; the
benches in the foreground, to the Queen's right hand, seemed devoted
exclusively to young girls, the flower--perhaps, I should rather say,
the bud--of Villette aristocracy. Here were no jewels, no head-dresses,
no velvet pile or silken sheen purity, simplicity, and aerial grace
reigned in that virgin band. Young heads simply braided, and fair forms
(I was going to write _sylph_ forms, but that would have been quite
untrue: several of these "jeunes filles," who had not numbered more
than sixteen or seventeen years, boasted contours as robust and solid
as those of a stout Englishwoman of five-and-twenty)--fair forms robed
in white, or pale rose, or placid blue, suggested thoughts of heaven
and angels. I knew a couple, at least, of these "rose et blanche"
specimens of humanity. Here was a pair of Madame Beck's late
pupils--Mesdemoiselles Mathilde and Angelique: pupils who, during their
last year at school, ought to have been in the first class, but whose
brains never got them beyond the second division. In English, they had
been under my own charge, and hard work it was to get them to translate
rationally a page of _The Vicar of Wakefield_. Also during three months
I had one of them for my vis-a-vis at table, and the quantity of
household bread, butter, and stewed fruit, she would habitually consume
at "second dejeuner" was a real world's wonder--to be exceeded only by
the fact of her actually pocketing slices she could not eat. Here be
truths--wholesome truths, too.

I knew another of these seraphs--the prettiest, or, at any rate, the
least demure and hypocritical looking of the lot: s