The old merchant was to be seen standing on the threshold of his shop,
as if by a miracle, the instant the servant withdrew. Monsieur
Guillaume looked at the Rue Saint-Denis, at the neighboring shops, and
at the weather, like a man disembarking at Havre, and seeing France
once more after a long voyage. Having convinced himself that nothing
had changed while he was asleep, he presently perceived the stranger
on guard, and he, on his part, gazed at the patriarchal draper as
Humboldt may have scrutinized the first electric eel he saw in
America. Monsieur Guillaume wore loose black velvet breeches,
pepper-and-salt stockings, and square toed shoes with silver buckles.
His coat, with square-cut fronts, square-cut tails, and square-cut
collar clothed his slightly bent figure in greenish cloth, finished with
white metal buttons, tawny from wear. His gray hair was so accurately
combed and flattened over his yellow pate that it made it look like a
furrowed field. His little green eyes, that might have been pierced
with a gimlet, flashed beneath arches faintly tinged with red in the
place of eyebrows. Anxieties had wrinkled his forehead with as many
horizontal lines as there were creases in his coat. This colorless
face expressed patience, commercial shrewdness, and the sort of wily
cupidity which is needful in business. At that time these old families
were less rare than they are now, in which the characteristic habits
and costume of their calling, surviving in the midst of more recent
civilization, were preserved as cherished traditions, like the
antediluvian remains found by Cuvier in the quarries.

The head of the Guillaume family was a notable upholder of ancient
practices; he might be heard to regret the Provost of Merchants, and
never did he mention a decision of the Tribunal of Commerce without
calling it the _Sentence of the Consuls_. Up and dressed the first of