Courts abound in impertinent people, in idlers, in rich loungers hungering for gossip, in those who seek for needles in trusses of hay, in triflers, in banterers bantered, in witty ninnies, who cannot do without converse with an envious man.

What a refreshing thing is the evil spoken to you of others.

Envy is good stuff to make a spy.  There is a profound analogy between that natural passion, envy, and that social function, espionage.  The spy hunts on others’ account, like the dog.  The envious man hunts on his own, like the cat.

A fierce Myself, such is the envious man.

He had other qualities.  Barkilphedro was discreet, secret, concrete.  He kept in everything and racked himself with his hate.  Enormous baseness implies enormous vanity.  He was liked by those whom he amused, and hated by all others; but he felt that he was disdained by those who hated him, and despised by those who liked him.  He restrained himself.  All his gall simmered noiselessly in his hostile resignation.  He was indignant, as if rogues had the right to be so.  He was the furies’ silent prey.  To swallow everything was his talent.  There were deaf wraths within him, frenzies of interior rage, black and brooding flames unseen; he was a smoke-consuming man of passion.  The surface was smiling.  He was kind, prompt, easy, amiable, obliging.  Never mind to whom, never mind where, he bowed.  For a breath of wind he inclined to the earth.  What a source of fortune to have a reed for a spine!  Such concealed and venomous beings are not so rare as is believed.  We live surrounded by ill-omened crawling things.  Wherefore the malevolent?  A keen question!  The dreamer constantly proposes it to himself, and the thinker never resolves it.  Hence the sad eye of the philosophers ever fixed upon that mountain of darkness which is destiny, and from the top of which the colossal spectre of evil casts handfuls of serpents over the earth.

Barkilphedro’s body was obese and his face lean.  A fat bust and a bony countenance.  His nails were channelled and short, his fingers knotted, his thumbs flat, his hair coarse, his temples wide apart, and his forehead a murderer’s, broad and low.  The littleness of his eye was hidden under his bushy eyebrows.  His nose, long, sharp, and flabby, nearly met his mouth.  Barkilphedro, properly attired, as an emperor, would have somewhat resembled Domitian.  His face of muddy yellow might have been modelled in slimy paste—­his immovable cheeks were like putty; he had all kinds of ugly refractory wrinkles; the angle of his jaw was massive, his chin heavy, his ear underbred.  In repose, and seen in profile, his upper lip was raised at an acute angle, showing two teeth.  Those teeth seemed to look at you.  The teeth can look, just as the eye can bite.

Patience, temperance, continence, reserve, self-control, amenity, deference, gentleness, politeness, sobriety, chastity, completed and finished Barkilphedro.  He culumniated those virtues by their possession.