be condemned to pick up such bribes falling from such a hand, what a frightful iniquity!  And what social system is this which has for its base disproportion and injustice?  Would it not be best to take it by the four corners, and to throw pell-mell to the ceiling the damask tablecloth, and the festival, and the orgies, and the tippling and drunkenness, and the guests, and those with their elbows on the table, and those with their paws under it, and the insolent who give and the idiots who accept, and to spit it all back again in the face of Providence, and fling all the earth to the heavens?  In the meantime let us stick our claws into Josiana.

Thus dreamed Barkilphedro.  Such were the ragings of his soul.  It is the habit of the envious man to absolve himself, amalgamating with his personal grievance the public wrongs.

All the wild forms of hateful passions went and came in the intellect of this ferocious being.  At the corners of old maps of the world of the fifteenth century are great vague spaces without shape or name, on which are written these three words, Hic sunt leones.  Such a dark corner is there also in man.  Passions grow and growl somewhere within us, and we may say of an obscure portion of our souls, “There are lions here.”

Is this scaffolding of wild reasoning absolutely absurd? does it lack a certain justice?  We must confess it does not.

It is fearful to think that judgment within us is not justice.  Judgment is the relative, justice is the absolute.  Think of the difference between a judge and a just man.

Wicked men lead conscience astray with authority.  There are gymnastics of untruth.  A sophist is a forger, and this forger sometimes brutalizes good sense.

A certain logic, very supple, very implacable, and very agile, is at the service of evil, and excels in stabbing truth in the dark.  These are blows struck by the devil at Providence.

The worst of it was that Barkilphedro had a presentiment.  He was undertaking a heavy task, and he was afraid that after all the evil achieved might not be proportionate to the work.

To be corrosive as he was, to have within himself a will of steel, a hate of diamond, a burning curiosity for the catastrophe, and to burn nothing, to decapitate nothing, to exterminate nothing; to be what he was, a force of devastation, a voracious animosity, a devourer of the happiness of others, to have been created (for there is a creator, whether God or devil), to have been created Barkilphedro all over, and to inflict perhaps after all but a fillip of the finger—­could this be possible? could it be that Barkilphedro should miss his aim?  To be a lever powerful enough to heave great masses of rock, and when sprung to the utmost power to succeed only in giving an affected woman a bump in the forehead—­to be a catapult dealing ruin on a pole-kitten!  To accomplish the task of Sisyphus, to crush an ant; to sweat all