And was he even one of the people?  Was not he, the mountebank, below the lowest of the low?  For the first time since he had arrived at the age of reflection, he felt his heart vaguely contracted by a sense of his baseness, and of that which we nowadays call abasement.  The paintings and the catalogues of Ursus, his lyrical inventories, his dithyrambics of castles, parks, fountains, and colonnades, his catalogues of riches and of power, revived in the memory of Gwynplaine in the relief of reality mingled with mist.  He was possessed with the image of this zenith.  That a man should be a lord!—­it seemed chimerical.  It was so, however.  Incredible thing!  There were lords!  But were they of flesh and blood, like ourselves?  It seemed doubtful.  He felt that he lay at the bottom of all darkness, encompassed by a wall, while he could just perceive in the far distance above his head, through the mouth of the pit, a dazzling confusion of azure, of figures, and of rays, which was Olympus.  In the midst of this glory the duchess shone out resplendent.

He felt for this woman a strange, inexpressible longing, combined with a conviction of the impossibility of attainment.  This poignant contradiction returned to his mind again and again, notwithstanding every effort.  He saw near to him, even within his reach, in close and tangible reality, the soul; and in the unattainable—­in the depths of the ideal—­the flesh.  None of these thoughts attained to certain shape.  They were as a vapour within him, changing every instant its form, and floating away.  But the darkness which the vapour caused was intense.

He did not form even in his dreams any hope of reaching the heights where the duchess dwelt.  Luckily for him.

The vibration of such ladders of fancy, if ever we put our foot upon them, may render our brains dizzy for ever.  Intending to scale Olympus, we reach Bedlam; any distinct feeling of actual desire would have terrified him.  He entertained none of that nature.

Besides, was he likely ever to see the lady again?  Most probably not.  To fall in love with a passing light on the horizon, madness cannot reach to that pitch.  To make loving eyes at a star even, is not incomprehensible.  It is seen again, it reappears, it is fixed in the sky.  But can any one be enamoured of a flash of lightning?

Dreams flowed and ebbed within him.  The majestic and gallant idol at the back of the box had cast a light over his diffused ideas, then faded away.  He thought, yet thought not of it; turned to other things—­returned to it.  It rocked about in his brain—­nothing more.  It broke his sleep for several nights.  Sleeplessness is as full of dreams as sleep.

It is almost impossible to express in their exact limits the abstract evolutions of the brain.  The inconvenience of words is that they are more marked in form than ideas.  All ideas have indistinct boundary lines, words have not.  A certain diffused phase of the soul ever escapes words.  Expression has its frontiers, thought has none.