In spite of the warm red glow from the crimson silk curtains, he was very pale, and, though so remarkably handsome, his face wore such an expression of hatred and cruelty, that he would have inspired dislike, rather than admiration--as he sat there with a fierce frown contracting his brow, and savagely gnawing his under lip with his gleaming white teeth.

In fine, the occupant of the carriage that had so nearly run over the Baron de Sigognac was no other than the young Duke of Vallombreuse.
"Another failure!" said he to himself, with an oath, as he rolled along up the broad quay past the Tuileries.

"And yet I promised that stupid rascal of a coachman of mine twenty-five louis if he could be adroit enough to run afoul of that confounded de Sigognac--who is the bane of my life--and drive over him, as if by accident.

Decidedly the star of my destiny is not in the ascendant--this miserable little rustic lordling gets the better of me in everything.

Isabelle, sweet Isabelle, adores HIM, and detests me--he has beaten my lackeys, and dared to wound ME.
But there shall be an end of this sort of thing, and that speedily--even though he be invulnerable, and bear a charmed life, he must and shall be put out of my way--I swear it! though I should be forced to risk my name and my title to compass it." "Humph!" said Herode, drawing a long breath; "why those brutes must be of the same breed as the famous horses of that Diomedes, King of Thrace, we read of, that pursued men to tear them asunder, and fed upon their flesh.