Next evening Valerie armed herself for conquest by making such a toilet as a Frenchwoman can devise when she wishes to make the most of herself.  She studied her appearance in this great work as a man going out to fight a duel practises his feints and lunges.  Not a speck, not a wrinkle was to be seen.  Valerie was at her whitest, her softest, her sweetest.  And certain little “patches” attracted the eye.

It is commonly supposed that the patch of the eighteenth century is out of date or out of fashion; that is a mistake.  In these days women, more ingenious perhaps than of yore, invite a glance through the opera-glass by other audacious devices.  One is the first to hit on a rosette in her hair with a diamond in the centre, and she attracts every eye for a whole evening; another revives the hair-net, or sticks a dagger through the twist to suggest a garter; this one wears velvet bands round her wrists, that one appears in lace lippets.  These valiant efforts, an Austerlitz of vanity or of love, then set the fashion for lower spheres by the time the inventive creatress has originated something new.  This evening, which Valerie meant to be a success for her, she had placed three patches.  She had washed her hair with some lye, which changed its hue for a few days from a gold color to a duller shade.  Madame Steinbock’s was almost red, and she would be in every point unlike her.  This new effect gave her a piquant and strange appearance, which puzzled her followers so much, that Montes asked her: 

“What have you done to yourself this evening?”—­Then she put on a rather wide black velvet neck-ribbon, which showed off the whiteness of her skin.  One patch took the place of the assassine of our grandmothers.  And Valerie pinned the sweetest rosebud into her bodice, just in the middle above the stay-busk, and in the daintiest little hollow!  It was enough to make every man under thirty drop his eyelids.

“I am as sweet as a sugar-plum,” said she to herself, going through her attitudes before the glass, exactly as a dancer practises her curtesies.

Lisbeth had been to market, and the dinner was to be one of those superfine meals which Mathurine had been wont to cook for her Bishop when he entertained the prelate of the adjoining diocese.

Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Count Steinbock arrived almost together, just at six.  An ordinary, or, if you will, a natural woman would have hastened at the announcement of a name so eagerly longed for; but Valerie, though ready since five o’clock, remained in her room, leaving her three guests together, certain that she was the subject of their conversation or of their secret thoughts.  She herself had arranged the drawing-room, laying out the pretty trifles produced in Paris and nowhere else, which reveal the woman and announce her presence:  albums bound in enamel or embroidered with beads, saucers full of pretty rings, marvels of Sevres or Dresden mounted exquisitely by Florent and Chanor, statues, books, all the frivolities which cost insane sums, and which passion orders of the makers in its first delirium—­or to patch up its last quarrel.