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.  This accomplished dandy seemed to be thirty years of age.  His manners were those of good society; he wore jewels of value; the collar of his shirt came to the tops of his ears.  His conceited and even impertinent air betrayed a consciousness of hidden superiority.  His pallid face seemed bloodless, his thin flat nose had the sardonic expression which we see in a death’s head, and his green eyes were inscrutable; their glance was discreet in meaning just as the thin closed mouth was discreet in words.  The first man seemed on the whole a good fellow compared with this younger man, who was slashing the air with a cane, the top of which, made of gold, glittered in the sunshine.  The first man might have cut off a head with his own hand, but the second was capable of entangling innocence, virtue, and beauty in the nets of calumny and intrigue, and then poisoning them or drowning them.  The rubicund stranger would have comforted his victim with a jest; the other was incapable of a smile.  The first was forty-five years old, and he loved, undoubtedly, both women and good cheer.  Such men have passions which keep them slaves to their calling.  But the young man was plainly without passions and without vices.  If he was a spy he belonged to diplomacy, and did such work from a pure love of art.  He conceived, the other executed; he was the idea, the other was the form.

“This must be Gondreville, is it not, my good woman?” said the young man.

“We don’t say ‘my good woman’ here,” said Michu.  “We are still simple enough to say ‘citizen’ and ‘citizeness’ in these parts.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the young man, in a natural way, and without seeming at all annoyed.

Players of ecarte often have a sense of inward disaster when some unknown person sits down at the same table with them, whose manners, look, voice, and method of shuffling the cards, all, to their fancy, foretell defeat.  The instant Michu looked at the young man he felt an inward and prophetic collapse.  He was struck by a fatal presentiment; he had a sudden confused foreboding of the scaffold.  A voice told him that that dandy would destroy him, although there was nothing whatever in common between them.  For this reason his answer was rude; he was and he wished to be forbidding.

“Don’t you belong to the Councillor of State, Malin?” said the younger man.

“I am my own master,” answered Malin.