poem that shall have its birth in yours. After terrifying you by the
aspect of that broom, to-morrow he will draw another, and lying by it
a cat, asleep, but mysterious in its sleep, shall tell you that this
broom is that on which the wife of a German cobbler rides off to the
Sabbath on the Brocken. Or it will be a quite harmless broom, on which
he will hang the coat of a clerk in the Treasury. Decamps had in his
brush what Paganini had in his bow--a magnetically communicative
power.

Well, I should have to transfer to my style that striking genius, that
marvelous knack of the pencil, to depict the upright, tall, lean man
dressed in black, with black hair, who stood there without speaking a
word. This gentleman had a face like a knife-blade, cold and harsh,
with a color like Seine water when it was muddy and strewn with
fragments of charcoal from a sunken barge. He looked at the floor,
listening and passing judgment. His attitude was terrifying. He stood
there like the dreadful broom to which Decamps has given the power of
revealing a crime. Now and then, in the course of conversation, the
Marquise tried to get some tacit advice; but however eager her
questioning, he was as grave and as rigid as the statue of the
Commendatore.

The worthy Popinot, sitting on the edge of his chair in front of the
fire, his hat between his knees, stared at the gilt chandeliers, the
clock, and the curiosities with which the chimney-shelf was covered,
the velvet and trimmings of the curtains, and all the costly and
elegant nothings that a woman of fashion collects about her. He was
roused from his homely meditations by Madame d'Espard, who addressed
him in a piping tone: