The baron had no longer any teeth.  His lips, once red, now violet, and backed by hard gums only (with which he ate the bread his wife took care to soften by folding it daily in a damp napkin), drew inward to the mouth with a sort of grin, which gave him an expression both threatening and proud.  His chin seemed to seek his nose; but in that nose, humped in the middle, lay the signs of his energy and his Breton resistance.  His skin, marbled with red blotches appearing through his wrinkles, showed a powerfully sanguine temperament, fitted to resist fatigue and to preserve him, as no doubt it did, from apoplexy.  The head was crowned with abundant hair, as white as silver, which fell in curls upon his shoulders.  The face, extinguished, as we have said, in part, lived through the glitter of the black eyes in their brown orbits, casting thence the last flames of a generous and loyal soul.  The eyebrows and lashes had disappeared; the skin, grown hard, could not unwrinkle.  The difficulty of shaving had obliged the old man to let his beard grow, and the cut of it was fan-shaped.  An artist would have admired beyond all else in this old lion of Brittany with his powerful shoulders and vigorous chest, the splendid hands of the soldier,—­hands like those du Guesclin must have had, large, broad, hairy; hands that once had clasped the sword never, like Joan of Arc, to relinquish it until the royal standard floated in the cathedral of Rheims; hands that were often bloody from the thorns and furze of the Bocage; hands which had pulled an oar in the Marais to surprise the Blues, or in the offing to signal Georges; the hands of a guerilla, a cannoneer, a common solder, a leader; hands still white though the Bourbons of the Elder branch were again in exile.  Looking at those hands attentively, one might have seen some recent marks attesting the fact that the Baron had recently joined madame in La Vendee.  To-day that fact may be admitted.  These hands were a living commentary on the noble motto to which no Guenic had proved recreant:  Fac!

His forehead attracted attention by the golden tones of the temples, contrasting with the brown tints of the hard and narrow brow, which the falling off of the hair had somewhat broadened, giving still more majesty to that noble ruin.  The countenance—­a little material, perhaps, but how could it be otherwise?—­presented, like all the Breton faces grouped about the baron, a certain savagery, a stolid calm which resembled the impassibility of the Huguenots; something, one might say, stupid, due perhaps to the utter repose which follows extreme fatigue, in which the animal nature alone is visible.  Thought was rare.  It seemed to be an effort; its seat was in the heart more than in the head; it led to acts rather than ideas.  But, examining that grand old man with sustained observation, one could penetrate the mystery of this strange contradiction to the spirit of the century.  He had faiths, sentiments, inborn so