those who have wandered through deserted Paris at the hours when its
roar, hushed for a moment, rises and spreads in the distance like the
great voice of the sea. This strange young man must have seemed as
curious to the shopkeeping folk of the "Cat and Racket" as the "Cat
and Racket" was to him. A dazzlingly white cravat made his anxious
face look even paler than it really was. The fire that flashed in his
black eyes, gloomy and sparkling by turns, was in harmony with the
singular outline of his features, with his wide, flexible mouth,
hardened into a smile. His forehead, knit with violent annoyance, had
a stamp of doom. Is not the forehead the most prophetic feature of a
man? When the stranger's brow expressed passion the furrows formed in
it were terrible in their strength and energy; but when he recovered
his calmness, so easily upset, it beamed with a luminous grace which
gave great attractiveness to a countenance in which joy, grief, love,
anger, or scorn blazed out so contagiously that the coldest man could
not fail to be impressed.

He was so thoroughly vexed by the time when the dormer-window of the
loft was suddenly flung open, that he did not observe the apparition
of three laughing faces, pink and white and chubby, but as vulgar as
the face of Commerce as it is seen in sculpture on certain monuments.
These three faces, framed by the window, recalled the puffy cherubs
floating among the clouds that surround God the Father. The
apprentices snuffed up the exhalations of the street with an eagerness
that showed how hot and poisonous the atmosphere of their garret must
be. After pointing to the singular sentinel, the most jovial, as he
seemed, of the apprentices retired and came back holding an instrument
whose hard metal pipe is now superseded by a leather tube; and they
all grinned with mischief as they looked down on the loiterer, and
sprinkled him with a fine white shower of which the scent proved that