By degrees a paroxysm came over him, like a sweeping surge.  At the close of events there is always a last flash, in which all stands revealed once more.

He who judges meets the accused face to face.  Gwynplaine reviewed all that society and all that nature had done for him.  How kind had nature been to him!  How she, who is the soul, had succoured him!  All had been taken from him, even his features.  The soul had given him all back—­all, even his features; because there was on earth a heavenly blind girl made expressly for him, who saw not his ugliness, and who saw his beauty.

And it was from this that he had allowed himself to be separated—­from that adorable girl, from his own adopted one, from her tenderness, from her divine blind gaze, the only gaze on earth that saw him, that he had strayed!  Dea was his sister, because he felt between them the grand fraternity of above—­the mystery which contains the whole of heaven.  Dea, when he was a little child, was his virgin; because every child has his virgin, and at the commencement of life a marriage of souls is always consummated in the plenitude of innocence.  Dea was his wife, for theirs was the same nest on the highest branch of the deep-rooted tree of Hymen.  Dea was still more—­she was his light, for without her all was void, and nothingness; and for him her head was crowned with rays.  What would become of him without Dea?  What could he do with all that was himself?  Nothing in him could live without her.  How, then, could he have lost sight of her for a moment?  O unfortunate man!  He allowed distance to intervene between himself and his star and, by the unknown and terrible laws of gravitation in such things, distance is immediate loss.

Where was she, the star?  Dea!  Dea!  Dea!  Dea!  Alas! he had lost her light.  Take away the star, and what is the sky?  A black mass.  But why, then, had all this befallen him?  Oh, what happiness had been his!  For him God had remade Eden.  Too close was the resemblance, alas! even to allowing the serpent to enter; but this time it was the man who had been tempted.  He had been drawn without, and then, by a frightful snare, had fallen into a chaos of murky laughter, which was hell.  O grief!  O grief!  How frightful seemed all that had fascinated him!  That Josiana, fearful creature!—­half beast, half goddess!  Gwynplaine was now on the reverse side of his elevation, and he saw the other aspect of that which had dazzled him.  It was baleful.  His peerage was deformed, his coronet was hideous; his purple robe, a funeral garment; those palaces, infected; those trophies, those statues, those armorial bearings, sinister; the unwholesome and treacherous air poisoned those who breathed it, and turned them mad.  How brilliant the rags of the mountebank, Gwynplaine, appeared to him now!  Alas! where was the Green Box, poverty, joy, the sweet wandering life—­wandering together, like the swallows?  They never left each other then; he saw her every minute, morning,