Madame Colleville was examining la Peyrade and comparing him with
young Phellion, who was just then talking to Celeste, neither of them
paying any heed to what was going on around them. This is, certainly,
the right moment to depict the singular personage who was destined to
play a signal part in the Thuillier household, and who fully deserves
the appellation of a great artist.



CHAPTER V

A PRINCIPAL PERSONAGE

There exists in Provence, especially about Avignon, a race of men with
blond or chestnut hair, fair skin, and eyes that are almost tender,
their pupils calm, feeble, or languishing, rather than keen, ardent,
or profound, as they usually are in the eyes of Southerners. Let us
remark, in passing, that among Corsicans, a race subject to fits of
anger and dangerous irascibility, we often meet with fair skins and
physical natures of the same apparent tranquillity. These pale men,
rather stout, with somewhat dim and hazy eyes either green or blue,
are the worst species of humanity in Provence; and
Charles-Marie-Theodose de la Peyrade presents a fine type of that race,
the constitution of which deserves careful examination on the part of
medical science and philosophical physiology. There rises, at times,
within such men, a species of bile,--a bitter gall, which flies to
their head and makes them capable of ferocious actions, done,
apparently, in cold blood. Being the result of an inward intoxication,
this sort of dumb violence seems to be irreconcilable with their
quasi-lymphatic outward man, and the tranquillity of their benignant