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.
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