sombre a saffron, that it looked as if ten livers had been forced into a
jaundice, in order to supply its colour. His forehead was high, bald, and
very narrow. His cheekbones were extremely prominent, and his cheeks so
thin, that they seemed happier than Pyramus and Thisbe, and kissed each
other inside without any separation or division. His face was as sharp
and almost as long as an inverted pyramid, and was garnished on either
side by a miserable half starved whisker, which seemed scarcely able to
maintain itself, amid the general symptoms of atrophy and decay. This
charming countenance was supported by a figure so long, so straight, so
shadowy, that you might have taken it for the monument in a consumption.

But the chief characteristic of the man was the utter and wonderful
gravity I have before spoken of. You could no more have coaxed a smile
out of his countenance, than you could out of the poker, and yet Monsieur
Margot was by no means a melancholy man. He loved his joke, and his wine,
and his dinner, just as much as if he had been of a fatter frame; and it
was a fine specimen of the practical antithesis, to hear a good story, or
a jovial expression, leap friskily out of that long, curved mouth; it was
at once a paradox and a bathos--it was the mouse coming out of its hole
in Ely Cathedral.

I said that this gravity was M. Margot's most especial characteristic. I
forgot:--he had two others equally remarkable; the one was an ardent
admiration for the chivalrous, the other an ardent admiration for
himself. Both of these are traits common enough in a Frenchman, but in
Mons. Margot their excesses rendered them uncommon. He was a most ultra
specimen of le chevalier amoureux--a mixture of Don Quixote and the Duc
de Lauzun. Whenever he spoke of the present tense, even en professeur, he
always gave a sigh to the preterite, and an anecdote of Bayard; whenever
he conjugated a verb, he paused to tell me that the favourite one of his