t completed
the supernatural aspect of the man's whole person. The old soldier was
dry and lean. His forehead, intentionally hidden under a smoothly
combed wig, gave him a look of mystery. His eyes seemed shrouded in a
transparent film; you would have compared them to dingy mother-of-pearl
with a blue iridescence changing in the gleam of the wax lights. His
face, pale, livid, and as thin as a knife, if I may use such a vulgar
expression, was as the face of the dead. Round his neck was a tight
black silk stock.

Below the dark line of this rag the body was so completely hidden in
shadow that a man of imagination might have supposed the old head was
due to some chance play of light and shade, or have taken it for a
portrait by Rembrandt, without a frame. The brim of the hat which
covered the old man's brow cast a black line of shadow on the upper part
of the face. This grotesque effect, though natural, threw into relief by
contrast the white furrows, the cold wrinkles, the colorless tone of the
corpse-like countenance. And the absence of all movement in the
figure, of all fire in the eye, were in harmony with a certain look of
melancholy madness, and the deteriorating symptoms characteristic of
senility, giving the face an indescribably ill-starred look which no
human words could render.

But an observer, especially a lawyer, could also have read in this
stricken man the signs of deep sorrow, the traces of grief which had
worn into this face, as drops of water from the sky falling on fine
marble at last destroy its beauty. A physician, an author, or a judge
might have discerned a whole drama at the sight of its sublime horror,
while the least charm was its resemblance to the grotesques which
artists amuse themselves by sketching on a corner of the lithographic
stone while chatting with a friend.

On seeing the attorney, the stranger started, with the convulsive thrill
that comes over a poet when a sudden noise rouses him from a fruitful
reverie in silence and at night. The old man hastily removed his hat
and rose to bow to the young man; the leather lining of his hat was
doubtless very greasy; his wig stuck to it without his noticing it,
and left his head bare, showing his skull horribly disfigured by a
scar beginning at the nape of the neck and ending over the right eye, a
prominent seam all across his head. The sudden removal of the dirty
wig which the poor man wore to hide this gash gave the two lawyers no
inclinat