Even the women confessed her pre-eminence--for she was the most perfect dresser that even France could exhibit.

And to no pretensions do ladies ever concede with so little demur, as those which depend upon that feminine art which all study, and in which few excel.
Women never allow beauty in a face that has an odd-looking bonnet above it, nor will they readily allow any one to be ugly whose caps are unexceptionable.

Madame de Ventadour had also the magic that results from intuitive high breeding, polished by habit to the utmost.

She looked and moved the _grande dame_, as if Nature had been employed by Rank to make her so.

She was descended from one of the most illustrious houses of France; had married at sixteen a man of equal birth, but old, dull, and pompous--a caricature rather than a portrait of that great French _noblesse_, now almost if not wholly extinct.