d by the emotions of a warrior life, gave it a vague resemblance
to the vermiculated stone which we see in the buildings of that period;
his hair, like the whitish lichen of old oaks, gray before its time,
surrounded without grace a cruel brow, where religious intolerance
showed its passionate brutality. The shape of the aquiline nose, which
resembled the beak of a bird of prey, the black and crinkled lids of the
yellow eyes, the prominent bones of a hollow face, the rigidity of the
wrinkles, the disdain expressed in the lower lip, were all expressive
of ambition, despotism, and power, the more to be feared because
the narrowness of the skull betrayed an almost total absence of
intelligence, and a mere brute courage devoid of generosity. The face
was horribly disfigured by a large transversal scar which had the
appearance of a second mouth on the right cheek.

At the age of thirty-three the count, anxious to distinguish himself
in that unhappy religious war the signal for which was given on
Saint-Bartholomew's day, had been grievously wounded at the siege of
Rochelle. The misfortune of this wound increased his hatred against the
partisans of what the language of that day called "the Religion," but,
by a not unnatural turn of mind, he included in that antipathy all
handsome men. Before the catastrophe, however, he was so repulsively
ugly that no lady had ever been willing to receive him as a suitor. The
only passion of his youth was for a celebrated woman called La Belle
Romaine. The distrust resulting from this new misfortune made him
suspicious to the point of not believing himself capable of inspiring a
true passion; and his character became so savage that when he did have
some successes in gallantry he owed them to the terror inspired by
his cruelty. The left hand of this terrible Catholic, which lay on
the outside of the bed, will complete this sketch of his character.
Stretched out as if to guard the countess, as a miser guards his hoard,
that enormous hand was covered with hair so thick, it presented such
a network of veins and projecting muscles, that it gave the idea of a
branch of birch clasped with a growth of yellowing ivy.

Children looking at the count's face would have thought him an ogre,
terrible tales of whom they knew by heart. It was enough to see the
width and length of the space occupied by the count in the bed, to
imagine his gigantic proportions. When awake, his gray eyebrows hid his
eyelids in a