Implacable as the war then going on between the Church and Calvinism,
the count's forehead was threatening even while he slept. Many
furrows, produced by the emotions of a warrior life, gave it a vague
resemblance to the vermiculated stone which we see in the buildings of
that period; his hair, like the whitish lichen of old oaks, gray
before its time, surrounded without grace a cruel brow, where
religious intolerance showed its passionate brutality. The shape of
the aquiline nose, which resembled the beak of a bird of prey, the
black and crinkled lids of the yellow eyes, the prominent bones of a
hollow face, the rigidity of the wrinkles, the disdain expressed in
the lower lip, were all expressive of ambition, despotism, and power,
the more to be feared because the narrowness of the skull betrayed an
almost total absence of intelligence, and a mere brute courage devoid
of generosity. The face was horribly disfigured by a large transversal
scar which had the appearance of a second mouth on the right cheek.

At the age of thirty-three the count, anxious to distinguish himself
in that unhappy religious war the signal for which was given on
Saint-Bartholomew's day, had been grievously wounded at the siege of
Rochelle. The misfortune of this wound increased his hatred against
the partisans of what the language of that day called "the Religion,"
but, by a not unnatural turn of mind, he included in that antipathy
all handsome men. Before the catastrophe, however, he was so
repulsively ugly that no lady had ever been willing to receive him as
a suitor. The only passion of his youth was for a celebrated woman
called La Belle Romaine. The distrust resulting from this new
misfortune made him suspicious to the point of not believing himself
capable of inspiring a true passion; and his character became so
savage that when he did have some successes in gallantry he owed them