ted to swagger it with military
men; but the hat itself was a shocking specimen of the fifteen-franc
variety. Constant friction with a pair of enormous ears had left their
marks which no brush could efface from the underside of the brim; the
silk tissue (as usual) fitted badly over the cardboard foundation, and
hung in wrinkles here and there; and some skin-disease (apparently) had
attacked the nap in spite of the hand which rubbed it down of a morning.

Beneath the hat, which seemed ready to drop off at any moment, lay
an expanse of countenance grotesque and droll, as the faces which the
Chinese alone of all people can imagine for their quaint curiosities.
The broad visage was as full of holes as a colander, honeycombed with
the shadows of the dints, hollowed out like a Roman mask. It set all
the laws of anatomy at defiance. Close inspection failed to detect the
substructure. Where you expected to find a bone, you discovered a layer
of cartilaginous tissue, and the hollows of an ordinary human face were
here filled out with flabby bosses. A pair of gray eyes, red-rimmed
and lashless, looked forlornly out of a countenance which was flattened
something after the fashion of a pumpkin, and surmounted by a Don
Quixote nose that rose out of it like a monolith above a plain. It was
the kind of nose, as Cervantes must surely have explained somewhere,
which denotes an inborn enthusiasm for all things great, a tendency
which is apt to degenerate into credulity.

And yet, though the man's ugliness was something almost ludicrous, it
aroused not the slightest inclination to laugh. The exceeding melancholy
which found an outlet in the poor man's faded eyes reached the mocker
himself and froze the gibes on his lips; for all at once the thought
arose that this was a human creature to whom Nature had forbidden any
expression of love or tenderness, since such expression could only be
painful or ridiculous to the woman he loved. In the presence of such
misfortune a Frenchman is silent; to him it seems the most cruel of all
afflictions--to be unable to please!

The man so ill-favored was dressed after the fashion of shabby
gentility, a fashion which the rich not seldom try to copy. He wore
low shoes beneath gaiters of the pattern worn by the Imperial Guard,
doubtless for the sake of economy, because they kept the socks clean.
The rusty tinge of his black breeches, like the cut and the white or
shiny line of the creases, assigned the dat