two short days, he has made his way straight
into my favourable estimation— and how he has
worked the miracle, is more than I can tell.

It absolutely startles me, now he is in my mind,
to find how plainly I see him!— how much more
plainly than I see Sir Percival, or Mr. Fairlie, or
Walter Hartright, or any other absent person of
whom I think, with the one exception of Laura
herself! I can hear his voice, as if he was
speaking at this moment. I know what his
conversation was yesterday, as well as if I was
hearing it now. How am I to describe him?
There are peculiarities in his personal appearance,
his habits, and his amusements which I
should blame in the boldest terms, or ridicule
in the most merciless manner, if I had seen
them in another man. What is it that makes
me unable to blame them, or to ridicule them,
in him?

For example, he is immensely fat. Before
this time, I have always especially disliked
corpulent humanity. I have always maintained
that the popular notion of connecting excessive
grossness of size and excessive good-humour as
inseparable allies, was equivalent to declaring,
either that no people but amiable people ever
get fat, or that the accidental addition of so
many pounds of flesh has a directly favourable
influence over the disposition of the person on
whose body they accumulate. I have invariably
combated both these absurd assertions by
quoting examples of fat people who were as
mean, vicious, and cruel, as the leanest and
the worst of their neighbours. I have asked
whether Henry the Eighth was an amiable character?
whether Pope Alexander the Sixth was
a good man? Whether Mr. Murderer and Mrs.
Murderess Manning were not both unusually
stout people? Whether hired nurses, proverbially
as cruel a set of women as are to be
found in all England, were not, for the most
part, also as fat a set of women as are to be
found in all England?— and so on, through
dozens of other examples, modern and ancient,
native and foreign, high and low. Holding
these strong opinions on the subject with might
and main, as I do at this moment, here, nevertheless,
is Count Fosco, as fat as Henry the
Eighth himself, established in my favour, at one
day's notice, without let or hindrance from his
own odious corpulence. Marvellous indeed!

Is it his face that has recommended him? It
may be his face. He is a most remarkable likeness,
on a large scale, of the Great Napoleon. His features
have Napoleon's magnificent regularity:
his expression recals the grandly calm, immovable
power of the Great Soldier's face. This
striking resemblance certainly impressed me, to
begin with; but there is something in him
besides the resemblance, which has impressed
me more. I think the influence I am now trying
to find!, is in his eyes. They are the most
unfathomable grey eyes I ever saw; and they
have at times a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible
glitter in them, which forces me to look at him,
and yet causes me sensations, when I do look,
which I would rather not feel. Other parts of
his face and head have their strange peculiarities.
His complexion, for instance, has a singular
sallow-fairness, so much at variance with the
dark brown colour of his hair, that I suspect the
hair of being a wig; and his face, closely shaven
all over, is smoother and freer from all marks
and wrinkles than mine, though (according to
Sir Percival's account of him) he is close on
sixty years of age. But these are not the
prominent personal characteristics which dis-
tinguish him, to my mind, from all the other
men I have ever seen. The marked peculiarity
which singles him out from the rank and
file of humanity, lies entirely, so far as I can
tell at present, in the extraordinary expression
and extraordinary power of his eyes.

His manner, and his command of our language,
may also have assisted him, in some degree, to
establish himself in my good opinion. He has
that quiet deference, that look of pleased, attentive
interest, in listening to a woman, and that
secret gentleness in his voice, in speaking to a
woman, which, say what we may, we can none
of us resist. Here, too, his unusual command
of the English language necessarily helps him.
I had often heard of the extraordinary aptitude
which many Italians show in mastering our
strong, hard Northern speech; but, until I saw
Count Fosco, I had never supposed it possible
that any foreigner could have spoken English as
he speaks it. There are times when it is almost
impossible to detect, by his accent, that he is
not a countryman of our own; and, as for
fluency, there are very few born Englishmen who
can talk with as few stoppages and repetitions as
the Count. He may construct his sentences,
more or less, in the foreign way; but I have
never yet heard him use a wrong expression, or
hesitate for a moment in his choice of a word.

All the smallest characteristics of this strange
man have something strikingly original and perplexingly
contradictory in them. Fat as he is,
and old as he is, his movements are astonishingly
light and easy. He is as noiseless in a room as
any of us women; and, more than that, with all
his look of unmistakable mental firmness and
power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest
of us. He starts at chance noises as inveterately
as Laura herself. He winced and shuddered
yesterday, when Sir Percival beat one of the
spaniels, so that I felt ashamed of my own want
of tenderness and sensibility by comparison with
the Count.

The relation of this last incident reminds me
of one of his most curious peculiarities, which I
have not yet mentioned— his extraordinary fondness
for pet animals. Some of these he has left
on the Continent, but he has brought with him
to this house a cockatoo, two canary-birds, and
a whole family of white mice. He attends to
all the necessities of these strange favourites
himself, and he has taught the creatures to be
surprisingly fond of him, and familiar with him.
The cockatoo, a most vicious and treacherous
bird towards every one else, absolutely seems to
love him. When he lets it out of its cage, it
hops on to his knee, and claws its way up his