ith his left hand in his pocket, and the right hand
holding a hat with a greasy lining, the Marquise gave Rastignac a look
wherein lay a germ of mockery. The good man's rather foolish appearance
was so completely in harmony with his grotesque figure and scared looks,
that Rastignac, catching sight of Bianchon's dejected expression of
humiliation through his uncle, could not help laughing, and turned away.
The Marquise bowed a greeting, and made a great effort to rise from her
seat, falling back again, not without grace, with an air of apologizing
for her incivility by affected weakness.

At this instant the person who was standing between the fireplace and
the door bowed slightly, and pushed forward two chairs, which he offered
by a gesture to the doctor and the judge; then, when they had seated
themselves, he leaned against the wall again, crossing his arms.

A word as to this man. There is living now, in our day, a
painter--Decamps--who possesses in the very highest degree the art of
commanding your interest in everything he sets before your eyes, whether
it be a stone or a man. In this respect his pencil is more skilful than
his brush. He will sketch an empty room and leave a broom against the
wall. If he chooses, you shall shudder; you shall believe that this
broom has just been the instrument of crime, and is dripping with blood;
it shall be the broom which the widow Bancal used to clean out the room
where Fualdes was murdered. Yes, the painter will touzle that broom like
a man in a rage; he will make each hair of it stand on-end as though
it were on your own bristling scalp; he will make it the interpreter
between the secret poem of his imagination and the poem that shall have
its birth in yours. After terrifying you by the aspect of that broom,
to-morrow he will draw another, and lying by it a cat, asleep, but
mysterious in its sleep, shall tell you that this broom is that on which
the wife of a German cobbler rides off to the Sabbath on the Brocken. Or
it will be a quite harmless broom, on which he will hang the coat of a
clerk in the Treasury. Decamps had in his brush what Paganini had in his
bow--a magnetically communicative power.

Well, I should have to transfer to my style that striking genius, that
marvelous knack of the pencil, to depict the upright, tall, lean man
dressed in black, with black hair, who stood there without speaking a
word. This gentleman had a face like a knife-blade, cold and harsh, wit