Is it his face that has recommended him?

It may be his face.  He is a most remarkable likeness, on a large scale, of the great Napoleon.  His features have Napoleon’s magnificent regularity—­his expression recalls the grandly calm, immovable power of the Great Soldier’s face.  This striking resemblance certainly impressed me, to begin with; but there is something in him besides the resemblance, which has impressed me more.  I think the influence I am now trying to find is in his eyes.  They are the most unfathomable grey eyes I ever saw, and they have at times a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible glitter in them which forces me to look at him, and yet causes me sensations, when I do look, which I would rather not feel.  Other parts of his face and head have their strange peculiarities.  His complexion, for instance, has a singular sallow-fairness, so much at variance with the dark-brown colour of his hair, that I suspect the hair of being a wig, and his face, closely shaven all over, is smoother and freer from all marks and wrinkles than mine, though (according to Sir Percival’s account of him) he is close on sixty years of age.  But these are not the prominent personal characteristics which distinguish him, to my mind, from all the other men I have ever seen.  The marked peculiarity which singles him out from the rank and file of humanity lies entirely, so far as I can tell at present, in the extraordinary expression and extraordinary power of his eyes.

His manner and his command of our language may also have assisted him, in some degree, to establish himself in my good opinion.  He has that quiet deference, that look of pleased, attentive interest in listening to a woman, and that secret gentleness in his voice in speaking to a woman, which, say what we may, we can none of us resist.  Here, too, his unusual command of the English language necessarily helps him.  I had often heard of the extraordinary aptitude which many Italians show in mastering our strong, hard, Northern speech; but, until I saw Count Fosco, I had never supposed it possible that any foreigner could have spoken English as he speaks it.  There are times when it is almost impossible to detect, by his accent that he is not a countryman of our own, and as for fluency, there are very few born Englishmen who can talk with as few stoppages and repetitions as the Count.  He may construct his sentences more or less in the foreign way, but I have never yet heard him use a wrong expression, or hesitate for a moment in his choice of a word.

All the smallest characteristics of this strange man have something strikingly original and perplexingly contradictory in them.  Fat as he is and old as he is, his movements are astonishingly light and easy.  He is as noiseless in a room as any of us women, and more than that, with all his look of unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us.  He starts at chance noises as inveterately as Laura herself.  He winced and shuddered yesterday, when Sir Percival beat one of the spaniels, so that I felt ashamed of my own want of tenderness and sensibility by comparison with the Count.