much surprised that this notary should make me dance
attendance in his waiting-room. It is really most annoying."

"Will you walk into this side room, sir?" said the chief clerk, "and I
will inform M. Ferrand this instant."

M. de Saint-Remy shrugged his shoulders, and followed the head clerk. At
the end of a quarter of an hour, which seemed very tedious to him, and
which converted his spleen into anger, the viscount was introduced into
the notary's private apartment.

Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between these two men,
both of them profound physiognomists, and habituated to judge at a
glance of the persons with whom they had business. M. de Saint-Remy saw
Jacques Ferrand for the first time, and was struck with the expression
of his pallid, harsh, and impassive features,--the look concealed by the
large green spectacles; the skull half hid beneath an old black silk
cap. The notary was seated at his writing-desk, in a leathern armchair,
beside a low fireplace, almost choked up with ashes, and in which were
two black and smoking logs of wood. Curtains of green cotton, almost in
rags, hung on small iron rings at the windows, and, concealing the lower
window-panes, threw over the room, which was naturally dark, a livid and
unpleasant hue. Shelves of black wood were filled with deed-boxes, all
duly labelled. Some cherry-wood chairs, covered with threadbare Utrecht
velvet; a clock in a mahogany case; a floor yellow, damp, and chilling;
a ceiling full of cracks, and festooned with spiders' webs,--such was
the _sanctum sanctorum_ of M. Jacques Ferrand. Hardly had the viscount
made two steps into his cabinet, or spoken a word, than the notary, who
knew him by reputation, conceived an intense antipathy towards him. In
the first place, he saw in him, if we may say so, a rival in rogueries;
and then he hated elegance, grace, and youth in other persons, and more
especially when these advantages were attended with an air of insolent
superiority. The notary usually assumed a tone of rude and almost coarse
abruptness with his clients, who liked him the better for being in
behaviour like a boor of the Danube. He made up his mind to double this
brutality towards M. de Saint-Remy, who, only knowing the notary by
report also, expected to find an attorney either familiar or a fool; for
the viscount always imagined men of such probity as M. Ferrand had the
reputation for, as having an exterior almost ridiculous, but, so