His eyebrows were
still black, and left a ghostly reminiscence of Handsome Hulot, as
sometimes on the wall of some feudal building a faint trace of
sculpture remains to show what the castle was in the days of its
glory. This discordant detail made his eyes, still bright and
youthful, all the more remarkable in his tanned face, because it had
so long been ruddy with the florid hues of a Rubens; and now a certain
discoloration and the deep tension of the wrinkles betrayed the
efforts of a passion at odds with natural decay. Hulot was now one of
those stalwart ruins in which virile force asserts itself by tufts of
hair in the ears and nostrils and on the fingers, as moss grows on the
almost eternal monuments of the Roman Empire.
How had Valerie contrived to keep Crevel and Hulot side by side, each
tied to an apron-string, when the vindictive Mayor only longed to
triumph openly over Hulot? Without immediately giving an answer to
this question, which the course of the story will supply, it may be
said that Lisbeth and Valerie had contrived a powerful piece of
machinery which tended to this result. Marneffe, as he saw his wife
improved in beauty by the setting in which she was enthroned, like the
sun at the centre of the sidereal system, appeared, in the eyes of the
world, to have fallen in love with her again himself; he was quite
crazy about her.
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