His occupation gave him a lean, arid look; his hair was crisp and straight, shooting out at all points, and it flew to meet his cap as if it were alive.

He was a genius after a fashion, too, and at all the feasts and on national holidays he invented some new feature in the entertainments.
With an eye for the grotesque, he had formed a company of jovial blades, called Kalathumpians, after the manner of the mimes of old times in his beloved Dauphiny.
"All right, all right," he said, when Lagroin, in the half-lighted blacksmith shop, asked him to swear allegiance and service.

"'Brigadier, vous avez raison,'" he added, quoting a well-known song.

Then he hummed a little and coughed.

"We must have a show"-- he hummed again--"we must tickle 'em up a bit--touch 'em where they're silly with a fiddle and fife-raddy dee dee, ra dee, ra dee, ra dee!" Then, to Valmond: "We gave the fools who fought the Little Corporal sour apples in Dauphiny, my dear!" He followed this extraordinary speech with a plan for making an ingenious coup for Valmond, when his Kalathumpians should parade the streets on the evening of St.John the Baptist's Day.
With hands clasped the new recruits sang: "When from the war we come, Allons gai! Oh, when we ride back home, If we be spared that day, Ma luronne lurette, We'll laugh our scars away, Ma luronne lure, We'll lift the latch and stay, Ma luronne lure." The huge frame of the blacksmith, his love for his daughter, his simple faith in this new creed of patriotism, his tenderness of heart, joined to his irascible disposition, spasmodic humour, and strong arm, roused in Valmond an immediate liking, as keen, after its kind, as that he had for the Cure; and the avocat.