Note 1 — Chapter XIV · THE HERMIT OF SÉRIGNAN (1879–1910)

François Sicard, in his faultless medal and his admirable bust, has succeeded with rare felicity in reproducing for posterity this rugged, shaven face, full of laborious years; a peasant face, stamped with originality, under the wide felt hat of Provence; touched with geniality and benevolence, yet reflecting a world of energy. Sicard has fixed for ever this strange mask; the thin cheeks, ploughed into deep furrows, the strained nose, the pendent wrinkles of the throat, the thin, shrivelled lips, with an indescribable fold of bitterness at the corners of the mouth. The hair, tossed back, falls in fine curls over the ears, revealing a high, rounded forehead, obstinate and full of thought. But what chisel, what graver could reproduce the surprising shrewdness of that gaze, eclipsed from time to time by a convulsive tremor of the eyelids! What Holbein, what Chardin could render the almost extraordinary brilliance of those black eyes, those dilated pupils—the eyes of a prophet, a seer; singularly wide and deeply set, as though gazing always upon the mystery of things, as though made expressly to scrutinise Nature and decipher her enigmas? Above the orbits, two short, bristling eye-brows seem set there to guide the vision; one, by dint of knitting itself above the magnifying-glass, has retained an indelible fold of continual attention; the other, on the contrary, always updrawn, has the look of defying the interlocutor, of foreseeing his objections, of waiting with an ever-ready return-thrust.1