The only personal ornament of the room was a group of photographs on the mantelpiece.  Two were faded and brown, and represented Kendal’s parents, both of whom had been dead some years.  The other was a large cabinet photograph of a woman no longer very young—­a striking-looking woman, with a fine worn face and a general air of distinction and character.  There was a strong resemblance between her features and those of Eustace Kendal, and she was indeed his elder and only sister, the wife of a French senator, and her brother’s chief friend and counsellor.  Madame de Chateauvieux was a very noticeable person, and her influence over Eustace had been strong ever since their childish days.  She was a woman who would have justified a repetition in the present day of Sismondi’s enthusiastic estimate of the women of the First Empire.  She had that melange du meilleur ton, ’with the purest elegance of manner, and a store of varied information, with vivacity of impression and delicacy of feeling, which,’ as he declared to Madame d’Albany, ’belongs only to your sex, and is found in its perfection only in the best society of France.’

In the days when she and Eustace had been the only children of a distinguished and wealthy father, a politician of some fame, and son-in-law to the Tory premier of his young days, she had always led and influenced her brother.  He followed her admiringly through her London seasons, watching the impression she made, triumphing in her triumphs, and at home discussing every new book with her and sharing, at least in his college vacations, the secretary’s work for their father, which she did excellently, and with a quick, keen, political sense which Eustace had never seen in any other woman.  She was handsome in her own refined and delicate way, especially at night, when the sparkle of her white neck and arms and the added brightness of her dress gave her the accent and colour she was somewhat lacking in at other times.  Naturally, she was in no want of suitors, for she was rich and her father was influential, but she said ‘No’ many times, and was nearly thirty before M. de Chateauvieux, the first secretary of the French Embassy, persuaded her to marry him.  Since then she had filled an effective place in Parisian society.  Her husband had abandoned diplomacy for politics, in which his general tendencies were Orleanist, while in literature he was well known as a constant contributor to the Revue des Deux Mondes.  He and his wife maintained an interesting, and in its way influential, salon, which provided a meeting ground for the best English and French society, and showed off at once the delicate quality of Madame de Chateauvieux’s intelligence and the force and kindliness of her womanly tact.