uare-headed." Genestas was accustomed to read the
indications that mark the features of men destined to do great things,
since he had been brought into close relations with the energetic
natures sought out by Napoleon; so he suspected that there must be some
mystery in this life of obscurity, and said to himself as he looked at
the remarkable face before him:

"How comes it that he is still a country doctor?"

When he had made a careful study of this countenance, that, in spite of
its resemblance to other human faces, revealed an inner life nowise
in harmony with a commonplace exterior, he could not help sharing
the doctor's interest in his patient; and the sight of that patient
completely changed the current of his thoughts.

Much as the old cavalry officer had seen in the course of his soldier's
career, he felt a thrill of surprise and horror at the sight of a human
face which could never have been lighted up with thought--a livid face
in which a look of dumb suffering showed so plainly--the same look that
is sometimes worn by a child too young to speak, and too weak to cry any
longer; in short, it was the wholly animal face of an old dying cretin.
The cretin was the one variety of the human species with which the
commandant had not yet come in contact. At the sight of the deep,
circular folds of skin on the forehead, the sodden, fish-like eyes, and
the head, with its short, coarse, scantily-growing hair--a head
utterly divested of all the faculties of the senses--who would not have
experienced, as Genestas did, an instinctive feeling of repulsion for a
being that had neither the physical beauty of an animal nor the mental
endowments of man, who was possessed of neither instinct nor reason, and
who had never heard nor spoken any kind of articulate speech? It seemed
difficult to expend any regrets over the poor wretch now visibly drawing
towards the very end of an existence which had not been life in any
sense of the word; yet the old woman watched him with touching anxiety,
and was rubbing his legs where the hot water did not reach them with as
much tenderness as if he had been her husband. Benassis himself, after
a close scrutiny of the dull eyes and corpse-like face, gently took the
cretin's hand and felt his pulse.

"The bath is doing no good," he said, shaking his head; "let us put him
to bed again."

He lifted the inert mass himself, and carried him across to the
truckle-bed, from whence, no doubt, he had ju