opers of that Homer of
soldiery in a strong frame able to endure hardship, and his immortal
skirmishers in a fiery, crimson, knotted face, showing small capacity
for submission. A coarse felt hat, the brim of which was held to the
crown by stitches, protected a nearly bald head from the weather; below
it fell a quantity of white hair which a painter would gladly have paid
four francs an hour to copy,--a dazzling mass of snow, worn like that
in all the classical representations of Deity. It was easy to guess from
the way in which the cheeks sank in, continuing the lines of the mouth,
that the toothless old fellow was more given to the bottle than the
trencher. His thin white beard gave a threatening expression to his
profile by the stiffness of its short bristles. The eyes, too small for
his enormous face, and sloping like those of a pig, betrayed cunning and
also laziness; but at this particular moment they were gleaming with the
intent look he cast upon the river. The sole garments of this curious
figure were an old blouse, formerly blue, and trousers of the coarse
burlap used in Paris to wrap bales. All city people would have shuddered
at the sight of his broken sabots, without even a wisp of straw to stop
the cracks; and it is very certain that the blouse and the trousers had
no money value at all except to a paper-maker.

As Blondet examined this rural Diogenes, he admitted the possibility
of a type of peasantry he had seen in old tapestries, old pictures, old
sculptures, and which, up to this time, had seemed to him imaginary. He
resolved for the future not to utterly condemn the school of ugliness,
perceiving a possibility that in man beauty may be but the flattering
exception, a chimera in which the race struggles to believe.

"What can be the ideas, the morals, the habits, of such a being? What
is he thinking of?" thought Blondet, seized with curiosity. "Is he my
fellow-creature? We have nothing in common but shape, and even that!--"

He noticed in the old man's limbs the peculiar rigidity of the tissues
of persons who live in the open air, accustomed to the inclemencies
of the weather and to the endurance of heat and cold,--hardened to
everything, in short,--which makes their leathern skin almost a hide,
and their nerves an apparatus against physical pain almost as powerful
as that of the Russians or the Arabs.

"Here's one of Cooper's Red-skins," thought Blondet; "one needn't go to
America to study savages.