In person, Isidore was a tall, stout man of thirty-seven, who perspired freely, and whose head looked as if he had water on the brain.  This enormous head, covered with chestnut hair cropped close, was joined to the neck by rolls of flesh which overhung the collar of his coat.  He had the arms of Hercules, hands worthy of Domitian, a stomach which sobriety held within the limits of the majestic, to use a saying of Brillaet-Savarin.  His face was a good deal like that of the Emperor Alexander.  The Tartar type was in the little eyes and the flattened nose turned slightly up, in the frigid lips and the short chin.  The forehead was low and narrow.  Though his temperament was lymphatic, the devout Isidore was under the influence of a conjugal passion which time did not lessen.

In spite, however, of his resemblance to the handsome Russian Emperor and the terrible Domitian, Isidore Baudoyer was nothing more than a political office-holder, of little ability as head of his department, a cut-and-dried routine man, who concealed the fact that he was a flabby cipher by so ponderous a personality that no scalpel could cut deep enough to let the operator see into him.  His severe studies, in which he had shown the patience and sagacity of an ox, and his square head, deceived his parents, who firmly believed him an extraordinary man.  Pedantic and hypercritical, meddlesome and fault-finding, he was a terror to the clerks under him, whom he worried in their work, enforcing the rules rigorously, and arriving himself with such terrible punctuality that not one of them dared to be a moment late.  Baudoyer wore a blue coat with gilt buttons, a chamois waistcoat, gray trousers and cravats of various colors.  His feet were large and ill-shod.  From the chain of his watch depended an enormous bunch of old trinkets, among which in 1824 he still wore “American beads,” which were very much the fashion in the year VII.

In the bosom of this family, bound together by the force of religious ties, by the inflexibility of its customs, by one solitary emotion, that of avarice, a passion which was now as it were its compass, Elisabeth was forced to commune with herself, instead of imparting her ideas to those around her, for she felt herself without equals in mind who could comprehend her.  Though facts compelled her to judge her husband, her religious duty led her to keep up as best she could a favorable opinion of him; she showed him marked respect; honored him as the father of her child, her husband, the temporal power, as the vicar of Saint-Paul’s told her.  She would have thought it a mortal sin to make a single gesture, or give a single glance, or say a single word which would reveal to others her real opinion of the imbecile Baudoyer.  She even professed to obey passively all his wishes.  But her ears were receptive of many things; she thought them over, weighed and compared them in the solitude of her mind, and judged so soberly of men and events