over with hate, and for nothing at all.  Would not this be humiliating, when he felt himself a mechanism of hostility capable of reducing the world to powder!  To put into movement all the wheels within wheels, to work in the darkness all the mechanism of a Marly machine, and to succeed perhaps in pinching the end of a little rosy finger!  He was to turn over and over blocks of marble, perchance with the result of ruffling a little the smooth surface of the court!  Providence has a way of thus expending forces grandly.  The movement of a mountain often only displaces a molehill.

Besides this, when the court is the dangerous arena, nothing is more dangerous than to aim at your enemy and miss him.  In the first place, it unmasks you and irritates him; but besides and above all, it displeases the master.  Kings do not like the unskilful.  Let us have no contusions, no ugly gashes.  Kill anybody, but give no one a bloody nose.  He who kills is clever, he who wounds awkward.  Kings do not like to see their servants lamed.  They are displeased if you chip a porcelain jar on their chimney-piece or a courtier in their cortege.  The court must be kept neat.  Break and replace; that does not matter.  Besides, all this agrees perfectly with the taste of princes for scandal.  Speak evil, do none; or if you do, let it be in grand style.

Stab, do not scratch, unless the pin be poisoned.  This would be an extenuating circumstance, and was, we may remember, the case with Barkilphedro.

Every malicious pigmy is a phial in which is enclosed the dragon of Solomon.  The phial is microscopic, the dragon immense.  A formidable condensation, awaiting the gigantic hour of dilation!  Ennui consoled by the premeditation of explosion!  The prisoner is larger than the prison.  A latent giant! how wonderful!  A minnow in which is contained a hydra.  To be this fearful magical box, to contain within him a leviathan, is to the dwarf both a torture and a delight.

Nor would anything have caused Barkilphedro to let go his hold.  He awaited his time.  Was it to come?  What mattered that?  He watched for it.  Self-love is mixed up in the malice of the very wicked man.  To make holes and gaps in a court fortune higher than your own, to undermine it at all risks and perils, while encased and concealed yourself, is, we repeat, exceedingly interesting.  The player at such a game becomes eager, even to passion.  He throws himself into the work as if he were composing an epic.  To be very mean, and to attack that which is great, is in itself a brilliant action.  It is a fine thing to be a flea on a lion.

The noble beast feels the bite, and expends his mighty anger against the atom.  An encounter with a tiger would weary him less; see how the actors exchange their parts.  The lion, humiliated, feels the sting of the insect; and the flea can say, “I have in my veins the blood of a lion.”