O tragical enigma of life!  Behold what pitfalls!  A child, he had wrestled against the night, and had been stronger than it; a man, he had wrestled against destiny, and had overcome it.  Out of disfigurement he had created success; and out of misery, happiness.  Of his exile he had made an asylum.  A vagabond, he had wrestled against space; and, like the birds of the air, he had found his crumb of bread.  Wild and solitary, he had wrestled against the crowd, and had made it his friend.  An athlete, he had wrestled against that lion, the people; and he had tamed it.  Indigent, he had wrestled against distress, he had faced the dull necessity of living, and from amalgamating with misery every joy of his heart, he had at length made riches out of poverty.  He had believed himself the conqueror of life.  Of a sudden he was attacked by fresh forces, reaching him from unknown depths; this time, with menaces no longer, but with smiles and caresses.  Love, serpent-like and sensual, had appeared to him, who was filled with angelic love.  The flesh had tempted him, who had lived on the ideal.  He had heard words of voluptuousness like cries of rage; he had felt the clasp of a woman’s arms, like the convolutions of a snake; to the illumination of truth had succeeded the fascination of falsehood; for it is not the flesh that is real, but the soul.  The flesh is ashes, the soul is flame.  For the little circle allied to him by the relationship of poverty and toil, which was his true and natural family, had been substituted the social family—­his family in blood, but of tainted blood; and even before he had entered it, he found himself face to face with an intended fractricide.  Alas! he had allowed himself to be thrown back into that society of which Brantome, whom he had not read, wrote:  “The son has a right to challenge his father!” A fatal fortune had cried to him, “Thou art not of the crowd; thou art of the chosen!” and had opened the ceiling above his head, like a trap in the sky, and had shot him up, through this opening, causing him to appear, wild, and unexpected, in the midst of princes and masters.  Then suddenly he saw around him, instead of the people who applauded him, the lords who cursed him.  Mournful metamorphosis!  Ignominious ennobling!  Rude spoliation of all that had been his happiness!  Pillage of his life by derision!  Gwynplaine, Clancharlie, the lord, the mountebank, torn out of his old lot, out of his new lot, by the beaks of those eagles!

What availed it that he had commenced life by immediate victory over obstacle?  Of what good had been his early triumphs?  Alas! the fall must come, ere destiny be complete.

So, half against his will, half of it—­because after he had done with the wapentake he had to do with Barkilphedro, and he had given a certain amount of consent to his abductions—­he had left the real for the chimerical; the true for the false; Dea for Josiana; love for pride; liberty for power; labour proud and poor for opulence full of unknown responsibilities; the shade in which is God for the lurid flames in which the devils dwell; Paradise for Olympus!