unless he had previously dyed his hair and had now been forbidden to continue doing anything so tiring, seemed rather, as if by a kind of chemical precipitation, to have rendered gleamingly visible all the metal with which the locks, now pure silver, of his head and his beard were saturated and which sprang out from them like so many geysers, so that the old, decayed prince now wore the Shakespearian majesty of a King Lear.
