These ferreting and perspicacious blue eyes, glassy and glacial, might be taken for the model of that famous Eye, the formidable emblem of the police, invented during the Revolution.

Black silk gloves were on his hands and he carried a switch.

He was certainly some official personage, for he showed in his bearing, in his way of taking snuff and ramming it into his nose, the bureaucratic importance of an office subordinate, one who signs for his superiors and acquires a passing sovereignty by enforcing their orders.
The other man, whose dress was in the same style, but elegant and elegantly put on and careful in its smallest detail, wore boots _a la_ Suwaroff which came high upon the leg above a pair of tight trousers, and creaked as he walked.

Above his coat he wore a spencer, an aristocratic garment adopted by the Clichiens and the young bloods of Paris, which survived both the Clichiens and the fashionable youths.

In those days fashions sometimes lasted longer than parties,--a symptom of anarchy which the year of our Lord 1830 has again presented to us.