old sculptures, and which, up to this time, had seemed to him
imaginary. He resolved for the future not to utterly condemn the
school of ugliness, perceiving a possibility that in man beauty may be
but the flattering exception, a chimera in which the race struggles to
believe.

"What can be the ideas, the morals, the habits, of such a being? What
is he thinking of?" thought Blondet, seized with curiosity. "Is he my
fellow-creature? We have nothing in common but shape, and even
that!--"

He noticed in the old man's limbs the peculiar rigidity of the tissues
of persons who live in the open air, accustomed to the inclemencies of
the weather and to the endurance of heat and cold,--hardened to
everything, in short,--which makes their leathern skin almost a hide,
and their nerves an apparatus against physical pain almost as powerful
as that of the Russians or the Arabs.

"Here's one of Cooper's Red-skins," thought Blondet; "one needn't go
to America to study savages."

Though the Parisian was less than ten paces off, the old man did not
turn his head, but kept looking at the opposite bank with a fixity
which the fakirs of India give to their vitrified eyes and their
stiffened joints. Compelled by the power of a species of magnetism,
more contagious than people have any idea of, Blondet ended by gazing
at the water himself.

"Well, my good man, what do you see there?" he asked, after the lapse
of a quarter of an hour, during which time he saw nothing to justify