small eyes set in his head like those of a pig, expressive of
insatiable covetousness, and of insolent, half-jovial cruelty. These
ferreting and perspicacious blue eyes, glassy and glacial, might be
taken for the model of that famous Eye, the formidable emblem of the
police, invented during the Revolution. Black silk gloves were on his
hands and he carried a switch. He was certainly some official
personage, for he showed in his bearing, in his way of taking snuff
and ramming it into his nose, the bureaucratic importance of an office
subordinate, one who signs for his superiors and acquires a passing
sovereignty by enforcing their orders.

The other man, whose dress was in the same style, but elegant and
elegantly put on and careful in its smallest detail, wore boots _a la_
Suwaroff which came high upon the leg above a pair of tight trousers,
and creaked as he walked. Above his coat he wore a spencer, an
aristocratic garment adopted by the Clichiens and the young bloods of
Paris, which survived both the Clichiens and the fashionable youths.
In those days fashions sometimes lasted longer than parties,--a
symptom of anarchy which the year of our Lord 1830 has again presented
to us. This accomplished dandy seemed to be thirty years of age. His
manners were those of good society; he wore jewels of value; the
collar of his shirt came to the tops of his ears. His conceited and
even impertinent air betrayed a consciousness of hidden superiority.
His pallid face seemed bloodless, his thin flat nose had the sardonic
expression which we see in a death's head, and his green eyes were
inscrutable; their glance was discreet in meaning just as the thin
closed mouth was discreet in words. The first man seemed on the whole
a good fellow compared with this younger man, who was slashing the air
with a cane, the top of which, made of gold, glittered in the
sunshine. The first man might have cut off a head with his own hand,