buttons on the greenish coat,--all these reminiscences of Imperial
fashions were blended with a sort of afterwaft and lingering perfume
of the coquetry of the Incroyable--with an indescribable finical
something in the folds of the garments, a certain air of stiffness and
correctness in the demeanor that smacked of the school of David, that
recalled Jacob's spindle-legged furniture.

At first sight, moreover, you set him down either for the gentleman by
birth fallen a victim to some degrading habit, or for the man of small
independent means whose expenses are calculated to such a nicety that
the breakage of a windowpane, a rent in a coat, or a visit from the
philanthropic pest who asks you for subscriptions to a charity,
absorbs the whole of a month's little surplus of pocket-money. If you
had seen him that afternoon, you would have wondered how that
grotesque face came to be lighted up with a smile; usually, surely, it
must have worn the dispirited, passive look of the obscure toiler
condemned to labor without ceasing for the barest necessaries of life.
Yet when you noticed that the odd-looking old man was carrying some
object (evidently precious) in his right hand with a mother's care;
concealing it under the skirts of his coat to keep it from collisions
in the crowd, and still more, when you remarked that important air
always assumed by an idler when intrusted with a commission, you would
have suspected him of recovering some piece of lost property, some
modern equivalent of the marquise's poodle; you would have recognized
the assiduous gallantry of the "man of the Empire" returning in
triumph from his mission to some charming woman of sixty, reluctant as
yet to dispense with the daily visit of her elderly _attentif_.

In Paris only among great cities will you see such spectacles as this;
for of her boulevards Paris makes a stage where a never-ending drama