partook the hateful fate, to be a desolation not believed in; they jeered at his distress; to them he was but an extraordinary buffoon lifted out of some frightful condensation of misery, escaped from his prison, changed to a deity, risen from the dregs of the people to the foot of the throne, mingling with the stars, and who, having once amused the damned, now amused the elect.  All that was in him of generosity, of enthusiasm, of eloquence, of heart, of soul, of fury, of anger, of love, of inexpressible grief, ended in—­a burst of laughter!  And he proved, as he had told the lords, that this was not the exception; but that it was the normal, ordinary, universal, unlimited, sovereign fact, so amalgamated with the routine of life that they took no account of it.  The hungry pauper laughs, the beggar laughs, the felon laughs, the prostitute laughs, the orphan laughs to gain his bread; the slave laughs, the soldier laughs, the people laugh.  Society is so constituted that every perdition, every indigence, every catastrophe, every fever, every ulcer, every agony, is resolved on the surface of the abyss into one frightful grin of joy.  Now he was that universal grin, and that grin was himself.  The law of heaven, the unknown power which governs, had willed that a spectre visible and palpable, a spectre of flesh and bone, should be the synopsis of the monstrous parody which we call the world; and he was that spectre, immutable fate!

He had cried, “Pity for those who suffer.”  In vain!  He had striven to awake pity; he had awakened horror.  Such is the law of apparitions.

But while he was a spectre, he was also a man; here was the heartrending complication.  A spectre without, a man within.  A man more than any other, perhaps, since his double fate was the synopsis of all humanity.  And he felt that humanity was at once present in him and absent from him.  There was in his existence something insurmountable.  What was he?  A disinherited heir?  No; for he was a lord.  Was he a lord?  No; for he was a rebel.  He was the light-bearer; a terrible spoil-sport.  He was not Satan, certainly; but he was Lucifer.  His entrance, with his torch in his hand, was sinister.

Sinister for whom? for the sinister.  Terrible to whom? to the terrible.  Therefore they rejected him.  Enter their order? be accepted by them?  Never.  The obstacle which he carried in his face was frightful; but the obstacle which he carried in his ideas was still more insurmountable.  His speech was to them more deformed than his face.  He had no possible thought in common with the world of the great and powerful, in which he had by a freak of fate been born, and from which another freak of fate had driven him out.  There was between men and his face a mask, and between society and his mind a wall.  In mixing, from infancy, a wandering mountebank, with that vast and tough substance which is called the crowd, in saturating himself with the attraction of the multitude, and impregnating himself