the logic of design required
greater length in the oval of his head, more space between the chin,
which ended abruptly, and the forehead, which was reduced in height
by the way in which the hair grew. The face had, in short, a rather
compressed appearance. Hard work had already drawn furrows between the
eyebrows, which were somewhat too thick and too near together, like
those of a jealous nature. Though La Briere was then slight, he belonged
to the class of temperaments which begin, after they are thirty, to take
on an unexpected amount of flesh.

The young man would have seemed to a student of French history a very
fair representative of the royal and almost inconceivable figure of
Louis XIII.,--that historical figure of melancholy modesty without
known cause; pallid beneath the crown; loving the dangers of war and
the fatigues of hunting, but hating work; timid with his mistress to the
extent of keeping away from her; so indifferent as to allow the head
of his friend to be cut off,--a figure that nothing can explain but his
remorse for having avenged his father on his mother. Was he a Catholic
Hamlet, or merely the victim of incurable disease? But the undying worm
which gnawed at the king's vitals was in Ernest's case simply distrust
of himself,--the timidity of a man to whom no woman had ever said, "Ah,
how I love thee!" and, above all, the spirit of self-devotion without
an object. After hearing the knell of the monarchy in the fall of his
patron's ministry, the poor fellow had next fallen upon a rock covered
with exquisite mosses, named Canalis; he was, therefore, still seeking
a power to love, and this spaniel-like search for a master gave him
outwardly the air of a king who has met with his. This play of feeling,
and a general tone of suffering in the young man's face made it more
really beautiful than he was himself aware of; for he had always
been annoyed to find himself classed by women among the "handsome
disconsolate,"--a class which has passed out of fashion in these days,
when every man seeks to blow his own trumpet and put himself in the
advance.

The self-distrustful Ernest now rested his immediate hopes on the
fashionable clothes he intended to wear. He put on, for this sacred
interview, where everything depended on a first impression, a pair
of black trousers and carefully polished boots, a sulphur-colored
waistcoat, which left to sight an exquisitely fine shirt with opal
buttons, a black cravat, an