as
wont to remark that fame is a poison good to take in little doses.

From the moment when the man we speak of, Raoul Nathan, after a long
struggle, forced his way to the public gaze, he had put to profit the
sudden infatuation for form manifested by those elegant descendants
of the middle ages, jestingly called Young France. He assumed the
singularities of a man of genius and enrolled himself among those
adorers of art, whose intentions, let us say, were excellent; for surely
nothing could be more ridiculous than the costume of Frenchmen in the
nineteenth century, and nothing more courageous than an attempt to
reform it. Raoul, let us do him this justice, presents in his person
something fine, fantastic, and extraordinary, which needs a frame.
His enemies, or his friends, they are about the same thing, agree that
nothing could harmonize better with his mind than his outward form.

Raoul Nathan would, perhaps, be more singular if left to his natural
self than he is with his various accompaniments. His worn and haggard
face gives him an appearance of having fought with angels or devils;
it bears some resemblance to that the German painters give to the dead
Christ; countless signs of a constant struggle between failing human
nature and the powers on high appear in it. But the lines in his hollow
cheeks, the projections of his crooked, furrowed skull, the caverns
around his eyes and behind his temples, show nothing weakly in his
constitution. His hard membranes, his visible bones are the signs of
remarkable solidity; and though his skin, discolored by excesses, clings
to those bones as if dried there by inward fires, it nevertheless covers
a most powerful structure. He is thin and tall. His long hair, always
in disorder, is worn so for effect. This ill-combed, ill-made Byron has
heron legs and stiffened knee-joints, an exaggerated stoop, hands with
knotty muscles, firm as a crab's claws, and long, thin, wiry fingers.
Raoul's eyes are Napoleonic, blue eyes, which pierce to the soul; his
nose is crooked and very shrewd; his mouth charming, embellished
with the whitest teeth that any woman could desire. There is fire and
movement in the head, and genius on that brow. Raoul belongs to the
small number of men who strike your mind as you pass them, and who, in a
salon, make a luminous spot to which all eyes are attracted.

He makes himself remarked also by his "neglige," if we may borrow from
Moliere the word which Eliante us