The portrait of the judge on whom he
modelled Hermiston, i.e., Braxfield, was not in Stevenson's advocate
days bequeathed to the Parliament House, but he had seen it in a
Raeburn Exhibition he reviewed. He recollected the outward semblance
of the man in his receptive memory till he resurrected Braxfield as
Hermiston. The half-told tale is in itself a monument which,
unfinished though it be, shows us how clever an artificer Louis had
become.
And what manner of man to the outward eye was this gypsily-inclined
descendant of square-headed Scottish engineers? With his dark eyes
looking as if they had drunk in the sunshine in some southern land,
his uncut hair, his odd, shabby clothes clinging to his attenuated
frame, his elaborate manners and habit of gesticulating as he spoke,
he was often mistaken for a starving musician or foreign mountebank.
It is not surprising that continental officials doubted his
passport's statement that he was a Briton. In France he was
imprisoned, and he complains he could not pass a frontier or visit a
bank without suspicion.
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