and love.

In times gone by, Roguin--a large stout man, with a pimpled face, a
very bald forehead, and black hair--had not been wanting in a certain
force of character and countenance. He had once been young and daring;
beginning as a mere clerk, he had risen to be a notary; but at this
period his face showed, to the eyes of an observer, certain haggard
lines, and an expression of weariness in the pursuit of pleasure. When
a man plunges into the mire of excesses it is seldom that his face
shows no trace of it. In the present instance the lines of the
wrinkles and the heat of the complexion were markedly ignoble. Instead
of the pure glow which suffuses the tissues of a virtuous man and
stamps them, as it were, with the flower of health, the impurities of
his blood could be seen to master the soundness of his body. His nose
was ignominiously shortened like those of men in whom scrofulous
humors, attacking that organ, produce a secret infirmity which a
virtuous queen of France innocently believed to be a misfortune common
to the whole human race, for she had never approached any man but the
king sufficiently near to become aware of her blunder. Roguin hoped to
conceal this misfortune by the excessive use of snuff, but he only
increased the trouble which was the principal cause of his disasters.

Is it not a too-prolonged social flattery to paint men forever under
false colors, and never to reveal the actual causes which underlie
their vicissitudes, caused as they so often are by maladies? Physical
evil, considered under the aspect of its moral ravages, examined as to
its influence upon the mechanism of life, has been perhaps too much
neglected by the historians of the social kingdom. Madame Cesar had
guessed the secret of Roguin's household.