The Prior of St. Come by Bernard Capes — Read

A cadaverous, hump-shouldered man paced a walk of the Louvre garden. He would have been pronounced old, though, in fact, his years were no more than fifty. In form and expression he was the typical miser, lean and grey from abstinence, morose from suspicion, bent from persistent crouching over insufficient embers. His face was tallow grey; the whites of his eyes and the orifices of his long, pinched nose were tinged with red. He was dressed in a short, waistless jerkin, once black, and trimmed at the hem with mangy fur, once brown. Black, ill-gartered hose covered to the hips a couple of legs like hurdle-stakes, and his stooped head was cased in a greasy calotte, surmounted by that form of cap known as the cap of maintenance, the brim of which, peaking to the front and raised behind, supported a number of little cheap leaden figures of saints. In contradiction to all this ostentatious shabbiness, a collar of gold shells and costly jewels hung about his neck.

As he paced deliberately, his hands clasped behind his back, his lips perpetually working without sound, he would glance up with a stealthy leer from time to time at a figure that walked beside him. This figure, sufficiently jocund and prosperous for contrast, was that of a healthy priest in cape and cassock, with a crisp, golden beard and blue eyes, a certain craft in which rather belied their conscious merriment. An odd broadness of the skull above the ears, which were gross and misshapen, betokened in this person a development of what Spurzheim would have called an "affective propensity to acquisitiveness. " He was, however, a notoriously holy man, and one of the King's chaplains to boot. The other was the King himself, Louis XI.