The light sometimes softened, sometimes revivified by some sudden flash of the flames, glanced over the scowling faces and red beards, enlivening the eyes and giving a supernatural animation to those lifeless canvases.

One would have said that the cold, grave faces looked with curiosity at the young woman with graceful movements and cool garments, whom Aladdin's genii seemed to have transported from the most elegant boudoir on the Chaussee d'Antin, and thrown, still frightened, into the midst of this strange assembly.
"You are crazy, Clemence, to leave that window open!" said at this moment an old voice issuing from an armchair placed in a corner near the fireplace.
The person who broke the charm of this silent scene was a woman of sixty or seventy years of age, according to the gallantry of the calculator.
It was easy to judge that she was tall and thin as she lay, rather than sat, in her chair with its back lowered down.

She was dressed in a yellowish-brown gown.

A false front as black as jet, surmounted by a cap with poppy-colored ribbons, framed her face.

She had sharp, withered features, and the brilliancy of her primitive freshness had been converted into a blotched and pimpled complexion which affected above all her nose and cheek-bones, but whose ardor had been dimmed only a trifle by age.