Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/24

 of one hand to avoid being dazzled. Like a man provoked at waiting, he looked now at the delightful fields that spread to the right of the road, and where the aftermath was growing, now at the wood-covered hill which, on the left, stretches from Nemours to Bouron. In the valley of the Loing, where echoed the noises of the road, thrown back by the hill, he could hear the gallop of his own horses and the crack of his postilions’ whips. Could any but a postmaster grow impatient before a field full of Paul Potter cattle, under a Raphael sky, over a canal shaded by trees in Hobbema’s style? Anyone acquainted with Nemours knows that there nature is as beautiful as art, whose mission is to spiritualize her; there, the scenery holds ideas and rouses thought. But, at sight of Minoret-Levrault, an artist would have forsaken the view to sketch this bourgeois, so original did his very coarseness render him. Combine all the conditions of the brute, and you get Caliban, which certainly is a great thing. Where form predominates, sentiment disappears. The postmaster, living proof of this axiom, presented one of those countenances in which a thinker can with difficulty trace the mind beneath the violent complexion produced by a rude development of the flesh. His blue cloth cap, small peaked and ribbed like a melon, outlined a head whose large dimensions proved that Gall’s science has not yet attacked the subject of exceptions. The gray and almost glossy hair projecting beyond the cap would have told you that other causes than intellectual