dumb.

When it happened that the distances between the bowls and the
_cochonnet_ had to be measured, the cane of this silent being was used
as a measure, the players coming up and taking it from the icy hands
of the old man and returning it without a word or even a sign of
friendliness. The loan of his cane seemed a servitude to which he
had negatively consented. When a shower fell, he stayed near the
_cochonnet_, the slave of the bowls, and the guardian of the unfinished
game. Rain affected him no more than the fine weather did; he was, like
the players themselves, an intermediary species between a Parisian
who has the lowest intellect of his kind and an animal which has the
highest.

In other respects, pallid and shrunken, indifferent to his own person,
vacant in mind, he often came bareheaded, showing his sparse white
hair, and his square, yellow, bald skull, like the knee of a beggar seen
through his tattered trousers. His mouth was half-open, no ideas were
in his glance, no precise object appeared in his movements; he never
smiled; he never raised his eyes to heaven, but kept them habitually on
the ground, where he seemed to be looking for something. At four o'clock
an old woman arrived, to take him Heaven knows where; which she did by
towing him along by the arm, as a young girl drags a wilful goat which
still wants to browse by the wayside. This old man was a horrible thing
to see.

In the afternoon of the day when Jules Desmarets left Paris, his
travelling-carriage, in which he was alone, passed rapidly through the
rue de l'Est, and came out upon the esplanade of the Observatoire at the
moment when the old man, leaning against a tree, had allowed his cane
to be taken from his hand amid the noisy vociferations of the players,
pacifically irritated. Jules, thinking that he recognized that face,
felt an impulse to stop, and at the same instant the carriage came to a
standstill; for the postilion, hemmed in by some handcarts, had too much
respect for the game to call upon the players to make way for him.

"It is he!" said Jules, beholding in that human wreck, Ferragus XXIII.,
chief of the Devorants. Then, after a pause, he added, "How he loved
her!--Go on, postilion."

ADDENDUM

Note: Ferragus is the first part of a trilogy. Part two is
entitled The Duchesse de Langeais and part three is The Girl with
the Golden Eyes. In other addendum references all three stories
are usually combined under the