The news of his death he received with much more meekness than could have been expected; but what he could not reconcile to himself was, the idea of dissection afterwards. ‘What can they want with me?’ cried the poor wretch, in an unusual fit of candour. ‘I am very small and ugly; it would be different if I were a tall, fine-looking fellow.’ But he was given to understand that beauty made very little difference to the surgeons, who, on the contrary, would, on certain occasions, prefer a deformed man to a handsome one; for science was much advanced by the study of such monstrosities. With this reason Poinsinet was obliged to be content; and so paid his rounds of visits, and repeated his dismal adieus. The officer of the provost-marshal, however amusing Poinsinet’s woes might have been, began, by this time, to grow very weary of them, and gave him more than one opportunity to escape. He would stop at shop-windows, loiter round comers, and look up in the sky, but all in vain: Poinsinet would not escape, do what the other would. At length, luckily, about dinner-time, the officer met one of Poinsinet’s friends and his own: and the three agreed to dine at a tavern, as they had breakfasted; and there the officer, who vowed that he had been up for five weeks incessantly, fell suddenly asleep in the profoundest fatigue; and Poinsinet was persuaded, after much hesitation on his part, to take leave of him. And now, this danger overcome, another was to be avoided. Beyond a doubt the police were after him, and how was he to avoid them? He must be disguised, of course; and one of his friends, a tall gaunt lawyer’s clerk, agreed to provide him with habits. So little Poinsinet dressed himself out in the clerk’s dingy black suit, of which the knee-breeches hung down to his heels, and the waist of the coat reached to the calves of his legs; and, furthermore, he blacked his eyebrows, and wore a huge black periwig, in which his friend vowed that no one could recognise him. But the most painful incident, with regard to the periwig, was, that Poinsinet, whose solitary beauty--if beauty it might be called--was a head of copious, curling yellow hair, was compelled to snip off every one of his golden locks, and to rub the bristles with a black dye; ‘for if your wig were to come off,’ said the lawyer, ‘and your fair hair to tumble over your shoulders, every man would know, or at least suspect you.’ So off the locks were cut, and in his black suit and periwig little Poinsinet went abroad.