He seemed to move about without constraint or
difficulty. He had carefully buttoned up his fashionable coat, which
disguised his powerful, elderly frame, and gave him the appearance of
an antiquated coxcomb who still follows the fashions.
For Raphael this animated puppet possessed all the interest of an
apparition. He gazed at it as if it had been some smoke-begrimed
Rembrandt, recently restored and newly framed. This idea found him a
clue to the truth among his confused recollections; he recognized the
dealer in antiquities, the man to whom he owed his calamities!
A noiseless laugh broke just then from the fantastical personage,
straightening the line of his lips that stretched across a row of
artificial teeth. That laugh brought out, for Raphael's heated fancy,
a strong resemblance between the man before him and the type of head
that painters have assigned to Goethe's Mephistopheles. A crowd of
superstitious thoughts entered Raphael's sceptical mind; he was
convinced of the powers of the devil and of all the sorcerer's
enchantments embodied in mediaeval tradition, and since worked up by
poets. Shrinking in horror from the destiny of Faust, he prayed for
the protection of Heaven with all the ardent faith of a dying man in
God and the Virgin.
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