Marquis de Carabas
“He wore a huge dandyish black coat that was not quite a frock coat nor exactly a trench coat, and high black boots, and, beneath his coat, raggedy clothes. His eyes burned white in an extremely dark face.”
“The Marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself--his clothes, his manner, his carriage--as a grand joke.”
“The Marquis de Carabas was not a good man, and he knew himself well enough to be perfectly certain that he was not a brave man. He had long since decided that the world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived, and, to this end, he had named himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself--his clothes, his manner, his carriage--as a grand joke.”
The Marquis de Carabas is a man who values debts over anything else. So when Lord Portico is murdered before he can pay off a life debt to the man, he instead opts to help his daughter, Door, in an indirect repayment of the debt. He becomes one of Door’s greatest allies as she tries to determine who killed her family, and goes to great lengths to ensure that he does his job well.