Chapter 2 - Page 2

was lined with innumerable wrinkles, which formed a net-work over
his cheek-bones and above his eyebrows, giving to his face a
resemblance to those choice old men whom Van Ostade, Rembrandt,
Mieris, and Gerard Dow so loved to paint, in pictures which need a
microscope to be fully appreciated. His countenance might be said to
be sunken out of sight beneath those innumerable wrinkles, produced by
a life in the open air and by the habit of watching his country in the
full light of the sun from the rising of that luminary to the sinking
of it. Nevertheless, to an observer enough remained of the
imperishable forms of the human face which appealed to the soul, even
though the eye could see no more than a lifeless head. The firm
outline of the face, the shape of the brow, the solemnity of the
lines, the rigidity of the nose, the form of the bony structure which
wounds alone had slightly altered,--all were signs of intrepidity
without calculation, faith without reserve, obedience without
discussion, fidelity without compromise, love without inconstancy. In
him, the Breton granite was made man.

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