At the sight of him all hats are quickly raised. His hair is graying and he is dressed in gray. He is a knight of several orders. He has a high forehead, an aquiline nose and, on the whole, his face is rather well proportioned; on first impression, it even seems to combine the dignity of a small-town mayor with the kind of charm that one may still find in a man of forty-eight or fifty. But the visitor from Paris is soon taken aback by his smug and conceited air, compounded with a hint of narrowness and lack of imagination. One senses before long that this man's chief talent is to make his debtors pay him exactly on time and to pay his own debts as late as possible.