wax lights. His face, pale, livid, and as thin as a knife, if I may
use such a vulgar expression, was as the face of the dead. Round his
neck was a tight black silk stock.

Below the dark line of this rag the body was so completely hidden in
shadow that a man of imagination might have supposed the old head was
due to some chance play of light and shade, or have taken it for a
portrait by Rembrandt, without a frame. The brim of the hat which
covered the old man's brow cast a black line of shadow on the upper
part of the face. This grotesque effect, though natural, threw into
relief by contrast the white furrows, the cold wrinkles, the colorless
tone of the corpse-like countenance. And the absence of all movement
in the figure, of all fire in the eye, were in harmony with a certain
look of melancholy madness, and the deteriorating symptoms
characteristic of senility, giving the face an indescribably
ill-starred look which no human words could render.

But an observer, especially a lawyer, could also have read in this
stricken man the signs of deep sorrow, the traces of grief which had
worn into this face, as drops of water from the sky falling on fine
marble at last destroy its beauty. A physician, an author, or a judge
might have discerned a whole drama at the sight of its sublime horror,
while the least charm was its resemblance to the grotesques which
artists amuse themselves by sketching on a corner of the lithographic
stone while chatting with a friend.

On seeing the attorney, the stranger started, with the convulsive
thrill that comes over a poet when a sudden noise rouses him from a
fruitful reverie in silence and at night. The old man hastily removed
his hat and rose to bow to the young man; the leather lining of his