by comparison with this giant
of cleverness and meanness. When in Paris you find a real type, he is no
longer a man, he is a spectacle; no longer a factor in life, but a whole
life, many lives.

Bake a plaster cast four times in a furnace, and you get a sort of
bastard imitation of Florentine bronze. Well, the thunderbolts of
numberless disasters, the pressure of terrible necessities, had bronzed
Contenson's head, as though sweating in an oven had three times over
stained his skin. Closely-set wrinkles that could no longer be relaxed
made eternal furrows, whiter in their cracks. The yellow face was all
wrinkles. The bald skull, resembling Voltaire's, was as parched as a
death's-head, and but for a few hairs at the back it would have seemed
doubtful whether it was that of a living man. Under a rigid brow, a
pair of Chinese eyes, like those of an image under a glass shade in a
tea-shop--artificial eyes, which sham life but never vary--moved but
expressed nothing. The nose, as flat as that of a skull, sniffed at
fate; and the mouth, as thin-lipped as a miser's, was always open, but
as expressionless as the grin of a letterbox.

Contenson, as apathetic as a savage, with sunburned hands, affected
that Diogenes-like indifference which can never bend to any formality of
respect.

And what a commentary on his life was written on his dress for any one
who can decipher a dress! Above all, what trousers! made, by long wear,
as black and shiny as the camlet of which lawyers' gowns are made! A
waistcoat, bought in an old clothes shop in the Temple, with a deep
embroidered collar! A rusty black coat!--and everything well brushed,
clean after a fashion, and graced by a watch and an imitation gold
chain. Contenson allowed a triangle of shirt to show, with pleats in
which glittered a sham diamond pin; his black velvet stock set stiff
like a gorget, over which lay rolls of flesh as red as that of a
Caribbee. His silk hat was as glossy as satin, but the lining would have
yielded grease enough for two street lamps if some grocer had bought it
to boil down.

But to enumerate these accessories is nothing; if only I could give an
idea of the air of immense importance that Contenson contrived to impart
to them! There was something indescribably knowing in the collar of his
coat, and the fresh blacking on a pair of boots with gaping soles, to
which no language can do justice. However, to give some notion of this
medley of effect, it may b