But already he is on his feet, bareheaded, in his waistcoat, his silk
necktie carelessly fastened under the soft turned-down collar of his half-
open shirt, his gesture, in the shadowy chamber, full of welcome.

François Sicard, in his faultless medal and his admirable bust, has
succeeded with rare felicity in reproducing for posterity this rugged,
shaven face, full of laborious years; a peasant face, stamped with
originality, under the wide felt hat of Provence; touched with geniality
and benevolence, yet reflecting a world of energy. Sicard has fixed for
ever this strange mask; the thin cheeks, ploughed into deep furrows, the
strained nose, the pendent wrinkles of the throat, the thin, shrivelled
lips, with an indescribable fold of bitterness at the corners of the mouth.
The hair, tossed back, falls in fine curls over the ears, revealing a high,
rounded forehead, obstinate and full of thought. But what chisel, what
graver could reproduce the surprising shrewdness of that gaze, eclipsed
from time to time by a convulsive tremor of the eyelids! What Holbein, what
Chardin could render the almost extraordinary brilliance of those black
eyes, those dilated pupils: the eyes of a prophet, a seer; singularly wide
and deeply set, as though gazing always upon the mystery of things, as
though made expressly to scrutinize Nature and decipher her enigmas? Above
the orbits, two short, bristling eyebrows seem set there to guide the
vision; one, by dint of knitting itself above the magnifying-glass, has
retained an indelible fold of continual attention; the other, on the
contrary, always updrawn, has the look of defying the interlocutor, of
foreseeing his objections, of waiting with an ever-ready return-thrust.
Such is this striking physiognomy, which one who has seen it cannot forget.

There, in this "hermit's retreat," as he himself has defined it, the sage
is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an ascetic living only