To have to make guesses as to the absent whom we love is to put oneself to the torture.  He inflicted this torture on himself.  At every thought that he fathomed, at every supposition which he made, he felt within him a moan of agony.

Through a succession of bitter reflections he remembered a man who was evidently fatal to him, and who had called himself Barkilphedro.  That man had inscribed on his brain a dark sentence which reappeared now; he had written it in such terrible ink that every letter had turned to fire; and Gwynplaine saw flaming at the bottom of his thought the enigmatical words, the meaning of which was at length solved:  “Destiny never opens one door without closing another.”

All was over.  The final shadows had gathered about him.  In every man’s fate there may be an end of the world for himself alone.  It is called despair.  The soul is full of falling stars.

This, then, was what he had come to.

A vapour had passed.  He had been mingled with it.  It had lain heavily on his eyes; it had disordered his brain.  He had been outwardly blinded, intoxicated within.  This had lasted the time of a passing vapour.  Then everything melted away, the vapour and his life.  Awaking from the dream, he found himself alone.

All vanished, all gone, all lost—­night—­nothingness.  Such was his horizon.

He was alone.

Alone has a synonym, which is Dead.  Despair is an accountant.  It sets itself to find its total; it adds up everything, even to the farthings.  It reproaches Heaven with its thunderbolts and its pinpricks.  It seeks to find what it has to expect from fate.  It argues, weighs, and calculates, outwardly cool, while the burning lava is still flowing on within.

Gwynplaine examined himself, and examined his fate.

The backward glance of thought; terrible recapitulation!

When at the top of a mountain, we look down the precipice; when at the bottom, we look up at heaven.  And we say, “I was there.”

Gwynplaine was at the very bottom of misfortune.  How sudden, too, had been his fall!

Such is the hideous swiftness of misfortune, although it is so heavy that we might fancy it slow.  But no!  It would likewise appear that snow, from its coldness, ought to be the paralysis of winter, and, from its whiteness, the immobility of the winding-sheet.  Yet this is contradicted by the avalanche.

The avalanche is snow become a furnace.  It remains frozen, but it devours.  The avalanche had enveloped Gwynplaine.  He had been torn like a rag, uprooted like a tree, precipitated like a stone.  He recalled all the circumstances of his fall.  He put himself questions, and returned answers.  Grief is an examination.  There is no judge so searching as conscience conducting its own trial.

What amount of remorse was there in his despair?  This he wished to find out, and dissected his conscience.  Excruciating vivisection!