"You, my dear friend! What good fortune is worth the pleasure of your visit tome? Can I be useful to you in any way?"
"You recognize me, then?"
"What! Do I recognize you? Do you ask that because you have cut your hair and beard? Certainly it changes you and gives you a new physiognomy; but I should be unworthy of my business if, by a different arrangement of the hair, I could not recognize you.
Besides, eyes of steel like yours are not forgotten; they are a description and a signature."
Then this means in which he placed so much confidence was only a new imprudence, as the question, "You recognize me, then?" was a mistake.
"Come, I will pose you at once," the photographer said. "Very curious, this shaved head, and still more interesting, I think, than with the beard and long hair. The traits of character are more clearly seen."
"It is not for a new portrait that I have come, but for the old one.
Have you any of the proofs?"
"I think not, but I will see. In any case, if you wish some they are easily made, since I have the plate."
"Will you look them up? For I have not a single proof left of those you gave me, and on looking at myself in the glass this morning I found such changes between my face of to-day and that of three years ago, that I would like to study them. Certain ideas came to me on the expression of the physiognomy, that I wish to study, with something to support them."
The search for the proofs made by an assistant led to no results; there were no proofs.