Page:The Works of Honoré de Balzac Volume 29.djvu/36

12 The commandant wheeled round at the words, as sharply as if he had felt a prick from a sword point, and saw, two paces from him, a queerer looking being than any of those now on the way to Mayenne to serve the Republic.

The stranger was a broad-shouldered, thick-set man; his head looked almost as large as that of a bull, and was not unlike it in other respects; his wide, thick nostrils made his nose seem shorter than it really was; his thick lips turned up to display a snowy set of teeth, long lashes bristled round the large black eyes, and he had a pair of drooping ears, and red hair that seemed to belong rather to some root-eating race than to the noble Caucasian stock. There was an entire absence of any other characteristics of civilized man about the bare head, which made it more remarkable still. His face might have been turned to bronze by the sun; its angular outlines suggested a remote resemblance to the granite rocks that formed the underlying soil of the district, and his face was the only discernible portion of the body of this strange being. From his neck downwards he was enveloped in a kind of smock-frock, or blouse of a coarse kind of material, much rougher than that of which the poorest conscript's breeches were made. This smock-frock of sarrau, in which an antiquary would have recognized the saye (saga) or sayon of the Gauls, reached only half-way down his person, where his nether integuments of goat's skin were fastened to it by wooden skewers, so roughly cut that the bark was not removed from all of them. It was scarcely possible to distinguish a human form in the "goatskins" (so they call them in the district), which completely covered his legs and thighs. His feet were hidden by huge sabots. His long, sleek hair, very near the color of the skins he wore, was parted in the middle and fell on either side of his face, much as you see it arranged in some mediæval statues still existing in cathedrals. Instead of the knotty cudgel with which the conscripts slung their wallets from their shoulders, he was hugging a large whip to his breast, like a gun, a whip with a cleverly plaited thong that seemed quite twice the usual length.