He found cause to modify the excellent impression he had received at first.
Marius's eyebrows were finely pencilled, but they arched a shade too much, and his eyes were set a trifle too closely; the mouth, which had seemed beautiful at first, looked, in addition, on this closer inspection, weak, sensual, and cruel.
There fell upon the momentary silence the sound of an opening door, and both men rose simultaneously to their feet.
In the splendid woman that entered, Monsieur de Garnache saw a wonderful likeness to the boy who stood beside him.

She received the emissary very graciously.

Marius set a chair for her between the two they had been occupying, and thus interchanging phrases of agreeable greeting the three sat down about the hearth with every show of the greatest amity.
A younger man might have been put out of countenance; the woman's surpassing beauty, her charm of manner, her melodious voice, falling on the ear soft and gentle as a caress, might have turned a man of less firmness a little from his purpose, a little perhaps from his loyalty and the duty that had brought him all the way from Paris.

But Monsieur de Garnache was to her thousand graces as insensible as a man of stone.
And he came to business briskly.

He had no mind to spend the day at her fireside in pleasant, meaningless talk.
"Madame," said he, "monsieur your son informs me that you have heard of me and of the business that brings me into Dauphiny.