She had a great fund of reserved sensibility, and her godfather and godmother, Mademoiselle Thuillier and Colleville, were unanimous on one point,--the great resource of mothers--namely, that Celeste was capable of attachment.

One of her beauties was a magnificent head of very fine blond hair; but her hands and feet showed her bourgeois origin.
Celeste endeared herself by precious qualities; she was kind, simple, without gall of any kind; she loved her father and mother, and would willingly sacrifice herself for their sake.

Brought up to the deepest admiration for her godfather by Brigitte (who taught her to say "Aunt Brigitte"), and by Madame Thuillier and her own mother, Celeste imbibed the highest idea of the ex-beau of the Empire.

The house in the rue Saint-Dominique d'Enfer produced upon her very much the effect of the Chateau des Tuileries on a courtier of the new dynasty.
Thuillier had not escaped the action of the administrative rolling-pin which thins the mind as it spreads it out.

Exhausted by irksome toil, as much as by his life of gallantry, the ex-sub-director had well-nigh lost all his faculties by the time he came to live in the rue Saint-Dominique.