with the great soul of mankind, he had lost, in the common sense of the whole of mankind, the particular sense of the reigning classes.  On their heights he was impossible.  He had reached them wet with water from the well of Truth; the odour of the abyss was on him.  He was repugnant to those princes perfumed with lies.  To those who live on fiction, truth is disgusting; and he who thirsts for flattery vomits the real, when he has happened to drink it by mistake.  That which Gwynplaine brought was not fit for their table.  For what was it?  Reason, wisdom, justice; and they rejected them with disgust.

There were bishops there.  He brought God into their presence.  Who was this intruder?

The two poles repel each other.  They can never amalgamate, for transition is wanting.  Hence the result—­a cry of anger—­when they were brought together in terrible juxtaposition:  all misery concentrated in a man, face to face with all pride concentrated in a caste.

To accuse is useless.  To state is sufficient.  Gwynplaine, meditating on the limits of his destiny, proved the total uselessness of his effort.  He proved the deafness of high places.  The privileged have no hearing on the side next the disinherited.  Is it their fault?  Alas! no.  It is their law.  Forgive them!  To be moved would be to abdicate.  Of lords and princes expect nothing.  He who is satisfied is inexorable.  For those that have their fill the hungry do not exist.  The happy ignore and isolate themselves.  On the threshold of their paradise, as on the threshold of hell, must be written, “Leave all hope behind.”

Gwynplaine had met with the reception of a spectre entering the dwelling of the gods.

Here all that was within him rose in rebellion.  No, he was no spectre; he was a man.  He told them, he shouted to them, that he was Man.

He was not a phantom.  He was palpitating flesh.  He had a brain, and he thought; he had a heart, and he loved; he had a soul, and he hoped.  Indeed, to have hoped overmuch was his whole crime.

Alas! he had exaggerated hope into believing in that thing at once so brilliant and so dark which is called Society.  He who was without had re-entered it.  It had at once, and at first sight, made him its three offers, and given him its three gifts—­marriage, family, and caste.  Marriage?  He had seen prostitution on the threshold.  Family?  His brother had struck him, and was awaiting him the next day, sword in hand.  Caste?  It had burst into laughter in his face, at him the patrician, at him the wretch.  It had rejected, almost before it had admitted him.  So that his first three steps into the dense shadow of society had opened three gulfs beneath him.

And it was by a treacherous transfiguration that his disaster had begun; and catastrophe had approached him with the aspect of apotheosis!

Ascend had signified Descend!

His fate was the reverse of Job’s.  It was through prosperity that adversity had reached him.