n seen
from behind, bore so perfect a resemblance to a cod that the name of
that fish was given to them. The fashion of codfish tails lasted ten
years; almost the whole period of the empire of Napoleon. The cravat,
loosely fastened, and with numerous small folds, allowed the wearer
to bury his face in it up to the nostrils. His pimpled skin, his long,
thick, brick-dust colored nose, his high cheek-bones, his mouth, lacking
half its teeth but greedy for all that and menacing, his ears adorned
with huge gold rings, his low forehead,--all these personal details,
which might have seemed grotesque in many men, were rendered terrible in
him by two small eyes set in his head like those of a pig, expressive
of insatiable covetousness, and of insolent, half-jovial cruelty. These
ferreting and perspicacious blue eyes, glassy and glacial, might be
taken for the model of that famous Eye, the formidable emblem of the
police, invented during the Revolution. Black silk gloves were on his
hands and he carried a switch. He was certainly some official personage,
for he showed in his bearing, in his way of taking snuff and ramming it
into his nose, the bureaucratic importance of an office subordinate,
one who signs for his superiors and acquires a passing sovereignty by
enforcing their orders.

The other man, whose dress was in the same style, but elegant and
elegantly put on and careful in its smallest detail, wore boots _a la_
Suwaroff which came high upon the leg above a pair of tight trousers,
and creaked as he walked. Above his coat he wore a spencer, an
aristocratic garment adopted by the Clichiens and the young bloods of
Paris, which survived both the Clichiens and the fashionable youths. In
those days fashions sometimes lasted longer than parties,--a symptom of
anarchy which the year of our Lord 1830 has again presented to us. This
accomplished dandy seemed to be thirty years of age. His manners were
those of good society; he wore jewels of value; the collar of his shirt
came to the tops of his ears. His conceited and even impertinent air
betrayed a consciousness of hidden superiority. His pallid face seemed
bloodless, his thin flat nose had the sardonic expression which we see
in a death's head, and his green eyes were inscrutable; their glance was
discreet in meaning just as the thin closed mouth was discreet in words.
The first man seemed on the whole a good fellow compared with this
younger man, who was slashing the air with a