of a baronial lord; their manners, harmonizing with their
notions, would have become princes, and offended all the world of the
Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve--a world, above all others, of
equality, where every one believed that M. d'Espard was ruined, and
where all, from the lowest to the highest, refused the privileges of
nobility to a nobleman without money, because they were all ready to
allow an enriched bourgeois to usurp them. Thus the lack of communion
between this family and other persons was as much moral as it was
physical.

In the father and the children alike, their personality harmonized with
the spirit within. M. d'Espard, at this time about fifty, might have
sat as a model to represent the aristocracy of birth in the nineteenth
century. He was slight and fair; there was in the outline and general
expression of his face a native distinction which spoke of lofty
sentiments, but it bore the impress of a deliberate coldness which
commanded respect a little too decidedly. His aquiline nose bent at the
tip from left to right, a slight crookedness which was not devoid of
grace; his blue eyes, his high forehead, prominent enough at the brows
to form a thick ridge that checked the light and shaded his eyes, all
indicated a spirit of rectitude, capable of perseverance and perfect
loyalty, while it gave a singular look to his countenance. This
penthouse forehead might, in fact, hint at a touch of madness, and his
thick-knitted eyebrows added to the apparent eccentricity. He had the
white well-kept hands of a gentleman; his foot was high and narrow. His
hesitating speech--not merely as to his pronunciation, which was that
of a stammerer, but also in the expression of his ideas, his thought
and language--produced on the mind of the hearer the impression of a
man who, in familiar phraseology, comes and goes, feels his way, tries
everything, breaks off his gestures, and finishes nothing. This defect
was purely superficial, and in contrast with the decisiveness of a
firmly-set mouth, and the strongly-marked character of his physiognomy.
His rather jerky gait matched his mode of speech. These peculiarities
helped to affirm his supposed insanity. In spite of his elegant
appearance, he was systematically parsimonious in his personal expenses,
and wore the same black frock-coat for three or four years, brushed with
extreme care by his old man-servant.

As to the children, they both were handsome, and endowed with a g