it, but still, he was not absolutely bald,
but quite bald enough to allow his butter-colored pate to show.
Butter-colored? Hardly! The color of margarine would be more applicable,
and such pale margarine.

His face was also like margarine, but of adulterated margarine,
certainly. By the side of it, his _cranium_, the color of unadulterated
margarine, looked almost like butter, by comparison.

There was very little to say about his mouth! Less than little; the sum
total was--nothing. It was a chimerical mouth.

But take it, that I have said nothing about him, and let us replace this
vain description by the useful formula: _Impossible to describe him_.
But you must not forget that Antinous Lebeau was ugly, that the fact
impressed everybody as soon as they saw him, and that nobody remembered
ever having seen an uglier person; and let us add, that as the climax of
his misfortune, he thought so himself.

From this you will see that he was not a fool, but, then, he was not
ill-natured, either; but, of course, he was unhappy. An unhappy man
thinks only of his wretchedness, and people take his night cap for a
fool's cap, while, on the other hand, goodness is only esteemed when it
is cheerful. Consequently, Antinous Lebeau passed for a fool, and an
ill-tempered fool, and he was not even pitied because he was so ugly.

He had only one pleasure in life, and that was to go and roam about the
darkest streets on dark nights, and to hear the street-walkers say:

"Come home with me, you handsome, dark man!"

It was, alas! a furtive pleasure, and he knew that it was not true. For,
occasionally, when the woman was old or drunk and he profited by the
invitation, as soon as the candle was lighted in the garret, they no
longer murmured the fallacious: _handsome, dark man_; and when they saw
him, the old women grew still older, and the drunken women got sober.
And more than one, although hardened against disgust, and ready for all
risks, said to him, and in spite of his liberal payment:

"My little man, you are most confoundedly ugly, I must say."

At last, however, he renounced even that lamentable pleasure, when he
heard the still more lamentable words which a wretched woman could not
help uttering when he went home with her:

"Well, he must have been very hungry!"

Alas! He was hungry, unhappy man; hungry for love, for something that
should resemble love, were it ever so little; he longed not to live like
a pariah any more, n