is trodden upon.  It is a fatal fact, and one indicating a profound social evil, that light should crush the shadow!  Gwynplaine thoroughly grasped this dark evil.  What! a destiny so reptile?  Shall a man drag himself thus along with such adherence to dust and corruption, with such vicious tastes, such an abdication of right, or such abjectness that one feels inclined to crush him under foot?  Of what butterfly is, then, this earthly life the grub?

What! in the crowd which hungers and which denies everywhere, and before all, the questions of crime and shame (the inflexibility of the law producing laxity of conscience), is there no child that grows but to be stunted, no virgin but matures for sin, no rose that blooms but for the slime of the snail?

His eyes at times sought everywhere, with the curiosity of emotion, to probe the depths of that darkness, in which there died away so many useless efforts, and in which there struggled so much weariness:  families devoured by society, morals tortured by the laws, wounds gangrened by penalties, poverty gnawed by taxes, wrecked intelligence swallowed up by ignorance, rafts in distress alive with the famished, feuds, dearth, death-rattles, cries, disappearances.  He felt the vague oppression of a keen, universal suffering.  He saw the vision of the foaming wave of misery dashing over the crowd of humanity.  He was safe in port himself, as he watched the wreck around him.  Sometimes he laid his disfigured head in his hands and dreamed.

What folly to be happy!  How one dreams!  Ideas were born within him.  Absurd notions crossed his brain.

Because formerly he had succoured an infant, he felt a ridiculous desire to succour the whole world.  The mists of reverie sometimes obscured his individuality, and he lost his ideas of proportion so far as to ask himself the question, “What can be done for the poor?” Sometimes he was so absorbed in his subject as to express it aloud.  Then Ursus shrugged his shoulders and looked at him fixedly.  Gwynplaine continued his reverie.

“Oh; were I powerful, would I not aid the wretched?  But what am I?  An atom.  What can I do?  Nothing.”

He was mistaken.  He was able to do a great deal for the wretched.  He could make them laugh; and, as we have said, to make people laugh is to make them forget.  What a benefactor on earth is he who can bestow forgetfulness!

CHAPTER XI.

GWYNPLAINE THINKS JUSTICE, AND URSUS TALKS TRUTH.

A philosopher is a spy.  Ursus, a watcher of dreams, studied his pupil.

Our monologues leave on our brows a faint reflection, distinguishable to the eye of a physiognomist.  Hence what occurred to Gwynplaine did not escape Ursus.  One day, as Gwynplaine was meditating, Ursus pulled him by his jacket, and exclaimed,—­