By way of a balance to this wealth of hair on his chin, a precocious baldness had despoiled his forehead, which was as bare as a billiard ball.

He vainly strove to conceal the nakedness of the land by brushing forward a tuft of hairs so scanty that they could almost be counted.

He wore a black coat worn at the elbows, and revealing whenever he raised his arms too high a ventilator under the armpits.

His trousers might have once been black, but his boots, which had never been new, seemed to have already gone round the world two or three times on the feet of the Wandering Jew.
Schaunard noticed that his new friend Colline and the young fellow with the big beard nodded to one another.
"You know the gentleman ?" said he to the philosopher.
"Not exactly," replied the latter, "but I meet him sometimes at the National Library.

I believe that he is a literary man." "He wears the garb of one, at any rate," said Schaunard.
The individual with whom this young fellow was arguing was a man of forty, foredoomed, by a big head wedged between his shoulders without any break in the shape of a neck, to the thunderstroke of apoplexy.
Idiocy was written in capital letters on his low forehead, surmounted by a little black skull-cap.