Bake a plaster cast four times in a furnace, and you get a sort of bastard imitation of Florentine bronze.  Well, the thunderbolts of numberless disasters, the pressure of terrible necessities, had bronzed Contenson’s head, as though sweating in an oven had three times over stained his skin.  Closely-set wrinkles that could no longer be relaxed made eternal furrows, whiter in their cracks.  The yellow face was all wrinkles.  The bald skull, resembling Voltaire’s, was as parched as a death’s-head, and but for a few hairs at the back it would have seemed doubtful whether it was that of a living man.  Under a rigid brow, a pair of Chinese eyes, like those of an image under a glass shade in a tea-shop—­artificial eyes, which sham life but never vary—­moved but expressed nothing.  The nose, as flat as that of a skull, sniffed at fate; and the mouth, as thin-lipped as a miser’s, was always open, but as expressionless as the grin of a letterbox.

Contenson, as apathetic as a savage, with sunburned hands, affected that Diogenes-like indifference which can never bend to any formality of respect.

And what a commentary on his life was written on his dress for any one who can decipher a dress!  Above all, what trousers! made, by long wear, as black and shiny as the camlet of which lawyers’ gowns are made!  A waistcoat, bought in an old clothes shop in the Temple, with a deep embroidered collar!  A rusty black coat!—­and everything well brushed, clean after a fashion, and graced by a watch and an imitation gold chain.  Contenson allowed a triangle of shirt to show, with pleats in which glittered a sham diamond pin; his black velvet stock set stiff like a gorget, over which lay rolls of flesh as red as that of a Caribbee.  His silk hat was as glossy as satin, but the lining would have yielded grease enough for two street lamps if some grocer had bought it to boil down.

But to enumerate these accessories is nothing; if only I could give an idea of the air of immense importance that Contenson contrived to impart to them!  There was something indescribably knowing in the collar of his coat, and the fresh blacking on a pair of boots with gaping soles, to which no language can do justice.  However, to give some notion of this medley of effect, it may be added that any man of intelligence would have felt, only on seeing Contenson, that if instead of being a spy he had been a thief, all these odds and ends, instead of raising a smile, would have made one shudder with horror.  Judging only from his dress, the observer would have said to himself, “That is a scoundrel; he gambles, he drinks, he is full of vices; but he does not get drunk, he does not cheat, he is neither a thief nor a murderer.”  And Contenson remained inscrutable till the word spy suggested itself.

This man had followed as many unrecognized trades as there are recognized ones.  The sly smile on his lips, the twinkle of his green eyes, the queer twitch of his snub nose, showed that he was not deficient in humor.  He had a face of sheet-tin, and his soul must probably be like his face.  Every movement of his countenance was a grimace wrung from him by politeness rather than by any expression of an inmost impulse.  He would have been alarming if he had not seemed so droll.