"What horrid weather!" This silhouette of Madame Latournelle is quite
important as an accessory, inasmuch as for three years she has been
the chaperone of the young girl against whom the notary and his friend
Dumay are now plotting to set up what we have called, in the
"Physiologie du Mariage," a "mouse-trap."

As for Latournelle, imagine a worthy little fellow as sly as the
purest honor and uprightness would allow him to be,--a man whom any
stranger would take for a rascal at sight of his queer physiognomy, to
which, however, the inhabitants of Havre were well accustomed. His
eyesight, said to be weak, obliged the worthy man to wear green
goggles for the protection of his eyes, which were constantly
inflamed. The arch of each eyebrow, defined by a thin down of hair,
surrounded the tortoise-shell rim of the glasses and made a couple of
circles as it were, slightly apart. If you have never observed on the
human face the effect produced by these circumferences placed one
within the other, and separated by a hollow space or line, you can
hardly imagine how perplexing such a face will be to you, especially
if pale, hollow-cheeked, and terminating in a pointed chin like that
of Mephistopheles,--a type which painters give to cats. This double
resemblance was observable on the face of Babylas Latournelle. Above
the atrocious green spectacles rose a bald crown, all the more crafty
in expression because a wig, seemingly endowed with motion, let the
white hairs show on all sides of it as it meandered crookedly across
the forehead. An observer taking note of this excellent Norman,
clothed in black and mounted on his two legs like a beetle on a couple
of pins, and knowing him to be one of the most trustworthy of men,
would have sought, without finding it, for the reason of such physical
misrepresentation.