He made that first stumble, a strange dream.  We should beware of the nature of the reveries that fasten on us.  Reverie has in it the mystery and subtlety of an odour.  It is to thought what perfume is to the tuberose.  It is at times the exudation of a venomous idea, and it penetrates like a vapour.  You may poison yourself with reveries, as with flowers.  An intoxicating suicide, exquisite and malignant.  The suicide of the soul is evil thought.  In it is the poison.  Reverie attracts, cajoles, lures, entwines, and then makes you its accomplice.  It makes you bear your half in the trickeries which it plays on conscience.  It charms; then it corrupts you.  We may say of reverie as of play, one begins by being a dupe, and ends by being a cheat.

Gwynplaine dreamed.

He had never before seen Woman.  He had seen the shadow in the women of the populace, and he had seen the soul in Dea.

He had just seen the reality.

A warm and living skin, under which one felt the circulation of passionate blood; an outline with the precision of marble and the undulation of the wave; a high and impassive mien, mingling refusal with attraction, and summing itself up in its own glory; hair of the colour of the reflection from a furnace; a gallantry of adornment producing in herself and in others a tremor of voluptuousness, the half-revealed nudity betraying a disdainful desire to be coveted at a distance by the crowd; an ineradicable coquetry; the charm of impenetrability, temptation seasoned by the glimpse of perdition, a promise to the senses and a menace to the mind; a double anxiety, the one desire, the other fear.  He had just seen these things.  He had just seen Woman.

He had seen more and less than a woman; he had seen a female.

And at the same time an Olympian.  The female of a god.

The mystery of sex had just been revealed to him.

And where?  On inaccessible heights—­at an infinite distance.

O mocking destiny!  The soul, that celestial essence, he possessed; he held it in his hand.  It was Dea.  Sex, that terrestrial embodiment, he perceived in the heights of heaven.  It was that woman.

A duchess!

“More than a goddess,” Ursus had said.

What a precipice!  Even dreams dissolved before such a perpendicular height to escalade.

Was he going to commit the folly of dreaming about the unknown beauty?

He debated with himself.

He recalled all that Ursus had said of high stations which are almost royal.  The philosopher’s disquisitions, which had hitherto seemed so useless, now became landmarks for his thoughts.  A very thin layer of forgetfulness often lies over our memory, through which at times we catch a glimpse of all beneath it.  His fancy ran on that august world, the peerage, to which the lady belonged, and which was so inexorably placed above the inferior world, the common people, of which he was one.