to see it better,
half-closing his eyes with exceeding superciliousness.

"What a wonderful bit of painting!" he said to himself. The stranger's
hair and eyebrows and a Mazarin tuft on the chin had been dyed black,
but the result was a spurious, glossy, purple tint that varied its hues
according to the light; the hair had been too white, no doubt, to
take the preparation. Anxiety and cunning were depicted in the narrow,
insignificant face, with its wrinkles incrusted by thick layers of red
and white paint. This red enamel, lacking on some portions of his face,
strongly brought out his natural feebleness and livid hues. It was
impossible not to smile at this visage with the protuberant forehead
and pointed chin, a face not unlike those grotesque wooden figures that
German herdsmen carve in their spare moments.

An attentive observer looking from Raphael to this elderly Adonis would
have remarked a young man's eyes set in a mask of age, in the case of
the Marquis, and in the other case the dim eyes of age peering forth
from behind a mask of youth. Valentin tried to recollect when and
where he had seen this little old man before. He was thin, fastidiously
cravatted, booted and spurred like one-and-twenty; he crossed his arms
and clinked his spurs as if he possessed all the wanton energy of
youth. He seemed to move about without constraint or difficulty. He
had carefully buttoned up his fashionable coat, which disguised his
powerful, elderly frame, and gave him the appearance of an antiquated
coxcomb who still follows the fashions.

For Raphael this animated puppet possessed all the interest of an
apparition. He gazed at it as if it had been some smoke-begrimed
Rembrandt, recently restored and newly framed. This idea found him a
clue to the truth among his confused recollections; he recognized the
dealer in antiquities, the man to whom he owed his calamities!

A noiseless laugh broke just then from the fantastical personage,
straightening the line of his lips that stretched across a row of
artificial teeth. That laugh brought out, for Raphael's heated fancy, a
strong resemblance between the man before him and the type of head
that painters have assigned to Goethe's Mephistopheles. A crowd
of superstitious thoughts entered Raphael's sceptical mind; he
was convinced of the powers of the devil and of all the sorcerer's
enchantments embodied in mediaeval tradition, and since worked up by
poets. Shrinking in horror from the