Saint Remy shrugged his shoulders, and followed the head clerk. At the end of a quarter of an hour, which seemed to him very long, and changed his contempt into rage, Saint Remy was introduced into the cabinet of the notary. Nothing could be more curious than the contrast of these two men, both profound physiognomists, and generally accustomed to judge at a first glance with whom they had to deal.
Saint Remy saw Jacques Ferrand for the first time. He was struck with the characteristics of this wan, rigid, impassible face; the expression concealed by the large green spectacles, the head half-hidden in an old black silk cap.
The notary was seated before his desk in a leathern arm-chair, beside a broken-down fireplace, filled with ashes, in which were smoking two black stumps. Curtains of green muslin, almost in tatters, suspended from iron rods, concealed the lower part of the windows, and cast into this cabinet, already dark enough, a dull and disagreeable light. Shelves of black wood, filled with labeled boxes; some chairs of cherry wood, covered with yellow Utrecht velvet; a mahogany clock; a yellow, moist, and slippery floor; a ceiling filled with cracks, and, ornamented with garlands of spider-webs; such was the sanctum sanctorum of Jacques Ferrand.
The viscount had not advanced two steps, had not said a single word, before the notary who knew him by reputation, hated him already. In the first place, he saw in him, so to speak, a rival in knavery; and, although Ferrand was of a mean and ignoble appearance himself, he did not the less detest in others elegance, grace, and youth; above all when an air deeply insolent accompanied these advantages.
The notary ordinarily affected a sort of rudeness, almost gross, toward his clients, who only felt more esteem for him for these boorish manners. He promised himself to redouble this brutality toward the viscount.
He, knowing M. Ferrand only by reputation, expected to find in him a kind of scrivener, good-natured or ridiculous, the viscount figuring to himself always that men of proverbial probity must be simpletons. Far from this, the other's looks imposed on the viscount an undefinable feeling, half fear, half hatred, although he had no serious reason to fear or hate him. Thus, in consequence of his resolute character, Saint Remy increased his insolence and habitual foppery of manner. The notary kept his cap upon his head; the viscount retained his hat, and cried from the door in a loud, sharp voice:
"It is, by Jove! very strange, that you give me the trouble to come here, instead of sending to me for the money for the bills I have indorsed for this Badinot, for which the fellow has sued me. You should not expose me to wait a quarter of an hour in your antechamber; that is not so polite as it might be."
Ferrand, without paying the least attention, finished a calculation he was making, wiped his pen methodically on the sponge which lay near his ink-stand, and raised toward the viscount his cold, unearthly, flattened face, encumbered with the green spectacles.
It looked like a death's head, whose eyes had been replaced by great, fixed, glassy sockets. After having looked at him for a moment in silence, he said to the viscount, in a rough, short tone, "Where is the money?"
Such coolness exasperated Saint Remy.