e added that any man of intelligence would
have felt, only on seeing Contenson, that if instead of being a spy he
had been a thief, all these odds and ends, instead of raising a smile,
would have made one shudder with horror. Judging only from his dress,
the observer would have said to himself, "That is a scoundrel; he
gambles, he drinks, he is full of vices; but he does not get drunk, he
does not cheat, he is neither a thief nor a murderer." And Contenson
remained inscrutable till the word spy suggested itself.

This man had followed as many unrecognized trades as there are
recognized ones. The sly smile on his lips, the twinkle of his green
eyes, the queer twitch of his snub nose, showed that he was not
deficient in humor. He had a face of sheet-tin, and his soul must
probably be like his face. Every movement of his countenance was a
grimace wrung from him by politeness rather than by any expression of
an inmost impulse. He would have been alarming if he had not seemed so
droll.

Contenson, one of the most curious products of the scum that rises to
the top of the seething Paris caldron, where everything ferments, prided
himself on being, above all things, a philosopher. He would say, without
any bitter feeling:

"I have great talents, but of what use are they? I might as well have
been an idiot."

And he blamed himself instead of accusing mankind. Find, if you can,
many spies who have not had more venom about them than Contenson had.

"Circumstances are against me," he would say to his chiefs. "We might be
fine crystal; we are but grains of sand, that is all."

His indifference to dress had some sense. He cared no more about his
everyday clothes than an actor does; he excelled in disguising himself,
in "make-up"; he could have given Frederic Lemaitre a lesson, for he
could be a dandy when necessary. Formerly, in his younger days, he must
have mingled in the out-at-elbows society of people living on a humble
scale. He expressed excessive disgust for the criminal police corps;
for, under the Empire, he had belonged to Fouche's police, and looked
upon him as a great man. Since the suppression of this Government
department, he had devoted his energies to the tracking of commercial
defaulters; but his well-known talents and acumen made him a valuable
auxiliary, and the unrecognized chiefs of the political police had kept
his name on their lists. Contenson, like his fellows, was only a super
in the dramas of which th