He does not look German or Israeli or professorial or like a man of science. Not a cliché in his persona. Although born in central Europe, he has the Balkan brown and semi-civilized complexion of a man from southeast Europe. And then, the looks of an artist in this creator of abstractions! With these clues, how would anyone identify him as the German wise man with the German wise-man look?  The classifying spirit gets upset. What label would fit our Balkan artist? Ah! That’s it: "Tzigane." How many Einsteins have we seen wearing red tails? Oh, fiddler of the open-air cafés by the seaside in hot summer cities, and nighttime player in dining rooms lit by phosphorous friar’s lanterns  in cold winter cities! Einstein radiates that nostalgic, dreamy, roving, dark look of the southerner bursting with passion mitigated by who knows what waltzes scattered around him. But Einstein is the gypsy who succeeded in composing a mathematical waltz that nobody had discerned among the sounds already heard by the Pythagoreans "in the highest sphere.”
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Strong jaws. Fleshy and moist lips, the lower one slightly dropping and plump. Nothing Semitic about his, biggish, upturned, irregular, poorly constructed nose. Like so many noses, it reveals and flaunts, alas, the last traces of character that have defied culture. The nose is the messenger of primal nature and thus it spills the beans. That nose of Einstein! After all, a man, an honest man, a brother to all. A nose that “is” to Einstein is like marble in the quarry before the sculpture.  But it will not find its sculptor! His forehead, however, did find him and it was a Michelangelo. Lofty width, broad, dominating, from which thoughts loom, like a balcony that opens to the countryside, the sea, the infinite space. It also resembles a blackboard with plenty of room on which to develop the formulae of relativity.
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That’s the way I saw Einstein at the Collège de France. Oh, the radiation of charisma of the great man!