This is, perhaps, the right moment to exhibit a full-length portrait of him, if only to justify the last letter that Modeste was still to write to him.
Born of a good family in Toulouse, and allied by marriage to the minister who first took him under his protection, Ernest had that air of good-breeding which comes of an education begun in the cradle; and the habit of managing business affairs gave him a certain sedateness which was not pedantic,--though pedantry is the natural outgrowth of premature gravity.

He was of ordinary height; his face, which won upon all who saw him by its delicacy and sweetness, was warm in the flesh-tints, though without color, and relieved by a small moustache and imperial a la Mazarin.

Without this evidence of virility he might have resembled a young woman in disguise, so refined was the shape of his face and the cut of his lips, so feminine the transparent ivory of a set of teeth, regular enough to have seemed artificial.

Add to these womanly points a habit of speech as gentle as the expression of the face; as gentle, too, as the blue eyes with their Turkish eyelids, and you will readily understand how it was that the minister occasionally called his young secretary Mademoiselle de La Briere.

The full, clear forehead, well framed by abundant black hair, was dreamy, and did not contradict the character of the face, which was altogether melancholy.