By what means, by the exercise of what acuteness had these two ordinary
mortals ascertained that which so many persons of the highest rank
and importance scarcely even suspected? It is impossible to say.
Had they the gifts of foreknowledge and foresight? Did they
possess a supplementary sense, which enabled them to see beyond
that limited horizon which bounds all human gaze? Had they obtained
a peculiar power of divining the most secret events? Was it owing
to the habit, now become a second nature, of living on information,
that their mental constitution had thus become really transformed?
It was difficult to escape from this conclusion.
Of these two men, the one was English, the other French; both were tall
and thin, but the latter was sallow as are the southern Provencals,
while the former was ruddy like a Lancashire gentleman.
The Anglo-Norman, formal, cold, grave, parsimonious of gestures
and words, appeared only to speak or gesticulate under
the influence of a spring operating at regular intervals.
The Gaul, on the contrary, lively and petulant, expressed himself
with lips, eyes, hands, all at once, having twenty different
ways of explaining his thoughts, whereas his interlocutor seemed
to have only one, immutably stereotyped on his brain.
The strong contrast they presented would at once have struck the most
superficial observer; but a physiognomist, regarding them closely,
would have defined their particular characteristics by saying,
that if the Frenchman was "all eyes," the Englishman was "all ears.
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