and brown spots, in which a thirst for the possession of property was
mingled with a concupiscence which had no heat,--for desire, once at
the boiling-point, had now stiffened like lava. His skin, brown as
that of a mummy, was glued to his temples. His scanty beard bristled
among his wrinkles like stubble in the furrows. Godain never
perspired, he reabsorbed his substance. His hairy hands, formed like
claws, nervous, never still, seemed to be made of old wood. Though
scarcely twenty-seven years of age, white lines were beginning to show
in his rusty black hair. He wore a blouse, through the breast opening
of which could be seen a shirt of coarse linen, so black that he must
have worn it a month and washed it himself in the Thune. His sabots
were mended with old iron. The original stuff of his trousers was
unrecognizable from the darns and the infinite number of patches. On
his head was a horrible cap, evidently cast off and picked up in the
doorway of some bourgeois house in Ville-aux-Fayes.

Clear-sighted enough to estimate the elements of good fortune that
centred in Catherine Tonsard, his ambition was to succeed her father
at the Grand-I-Vert. He made use of all his craftiness and all his
actual powers to capture her; he promised her wealth, he also promised
her the license her mother had enjoyed; besides this, he offered his
prospective father-in-law an enormous rental, five hundred francs a
year, for his inn, until he could buy him out, trusting to an
agreement he had made with Monsieur Brunet to pay these costs by notes
on stamped paper. By trade a journeyman tool-maker, this gnome worked
for the wheelwrights when work was plentiful, but he also hired
himself out for any extra labor which was well paid. Though he
possessed, unknown to the whole neighborhood, eighteen hundred francs
now in Gaubertin's hands, he lived like a beggar, slept in a barn, and
gleaned at the harvests. He wore Gaubertin's receipt for his money