represented by Gerolamo on the stage of his puppet show. His eyes
looked like glass beads. His nose, like the ace of clubs, was horribly
long and bulbous; in fact, it did its best to conceal an opening which
it would be an insult to the human countenance to call a mouth;
within, three or four tusks were visible, endowed, as it seemed, with
a proper motion and fitting into each other. His fleshy ears drooped
by their own weight, giving the creature a whimsical resemblance to a
dog.

His complexion, tainted, no doubt, by various metallic infusions as
prescribed by some Hippocrates, verged on black. A pointed skull,
scarcely covered by a few straight hairs like spun glass, crowned this
forbidding face with red spots. Finally, though the man was very thin
and of medium height, he had long arms and broad shoulders.

In spite of these hideous details, and though he looked fully seventy,
he did not lack a certain cyclopean dignity; he had aristocratic
manners and the confident demeanor of a rich man.

Any one who could have found courage enough to study him, would have
seen his history written by base passions on this noble clay degraded
to mud. Here was the man of high birth, who, rich from his earliest
youth, had given up his body to debauchery for the sake of extravagant
enjoyment. And debauchery had destroyed the human being and made
another after its own image. Thousands of bottles of wine had
disappeared under the purple archway of that preposterous nose, and
left their dregs on his lips. Long and slow digestion had destroyed
his teeth. His eyes had grown dim under the lamps of the gaming table.
The blood tainted with impurities had vitiated the nervous system. The
expenditure of force in the task of digestion had undermined his