Perhaps he deserves some description.

He is a type, short, wiry, and broad-shouldered, with a cunning eye, a long hooked nose, and very plentiful black whiskers, surmounted by a perfectly bald crown.

His motions are servile to the last degree, and he addresses everyone in authority as "excellency," on the principle that it is better to give too much titular homage than too little.

He is as wily as a fox, and so long as you have money in your pocket, as faithful as a hound and as silent as the grave.

I perceive that these are precisely the epithets at which the baron scoffed, saying that a man can be praised only by comparing him with the higher animals, or insulted by comparison with himself and his kind.