fill all the Place Louis XV. He has also a fine
practice, and patients of every kind coming on horseback, in carriages,
on foot, and in wooden shoes. He refuses no one, and cures every
body--even _Tamburin_. The poor animal is very fond of him, never
barking when he passes, but wagging his tail as if he knew his
physician. I alone attend to Doctor Matheus," continued Mlle. Crepeneau,
"and I flatter myself he is well waited on. He has a great deal of
trouble, too, especially on his consultation days. One would think then
all Paris met at his house. He is a brave man, and is not afraid of
ghosts! Yet he said the other day, 'I have killed so many people that
one more would run me mad.'"

Yet while Mlle. Crepineau was thus prodigal of her praises, in front of
No. 13, her lodger, as she called him, was in the third story of the
house, and was shut up in his room engaged in the strangest manner. The
studio had preserved nothing of its original destination but its name.
Instead of pictures, plaster casts, statuettes, and manikins, the table
was covered with manuscripts, books, pamphlets, and loose papers; on
this battle-field, where science, art and politics seemed to contend
together, stood a noble Japan vase from which arose a noble bouquet of
white camelias--above this hung the portrait of a protestant preacher.

Doctor Matheus, as Mlle. Celestine had said, was young and handsome. He
had luxuriant fair hair, hanging in clusters around his face and falling
on his shoulders, so as to give a seraphic air to his face, very well
calculated to touch the heart of pious Celestine. In his mild blue eyes,
however, there was an expression of will, decision and daring which
strangely contrasted with the rest of his face. The Doctor was tall and
elegantly formed, and wore at home the costume yet popular at Leipsig,
Gottingen and Heidelberg, a doublet of velvet and a kind of cap
surmounted by a plume. He had suppressed the plume. This is exactly the
costume of Karl de Moor in Schiller's robber; and in 1847 we saw the
pupils of those venerable universities strolling through the streets of
the German capitals in this very theatrical costume, precisely that of
Wilhelm Meister's actors when they met Mignon on the Ingolstadt road
just after their unfortunate representation of Hamlet. The Doctor, we
have said, was strangely engaged. He leaned over a vast chart of Europe,
extended before him like a body waiting for the knife of the anatomist.