The mechanism and the scheme of the world was apparent to him, and its working interested him no longer; he did not long disguise the profound scorn that makes of a man of extraordinary powers a sphinx who knows everything and says nothing, and sees all things with an unmoved countenance.  He felt not the slightest wish to communicate his knowledge to other men.  He was rich with all the wealth of the world, with one effort he could make the circle of the globe, and riches and power were meaningless for him.  He felt the awful melancholy of omnipotence, a melancholy which Satan and God relieve by the exercise of infinite power in mysterious ways known to them alone.  Castanier had not, like his Master, the inextinguishable energy of hate and malice; he felt that he was a devil, but a devil whose time was not yet come, while Satan is a devil through all eternity, and being damned beyond redemption, delights to stir up the world, like a dungheap, with his triple fork and to thwart therein the designs of God.  But Castanier, for his misfortune, had one hope left.

If in a moment he could move from one pole to the other as a bird springs restlessly from side to side in its cage, when, like the bird, he had crossed his prison, he saw the vast immensity of space beyond it.  That vision of the Infinite left him forever unable to see humanity and its affairs as other men saw them.  The insensate fools who long for the power of the Devil gauge its desirability from a human standpoint; they do not see that with the Devil’s power they will likewise assume his thoughts, and that they will be doomed to remain as men among creatures who will no longer understand them.  The Nero unknown to history who dreams of setting Paris on fire for his private entertainment, like an exhibition of a burning house on the boards of a theater, does not suspect that if he had that power, Paris would become for him as little interesting as an ant heap by the roadside to a hurrying passer-by.  The circle of the sciences was for Castanier something like a logogriph for a man who does not know the key to it.  Kings and Governments were despicable in his eyes.  His great debauch had been in some sort a deplorable farewell to his life as a man.  The earth had grown too narrow for him, for the infernal gifts laid bare for him the secrets of creation—­he saw the cause and foresaw its end.  He was shut out from all that men call “heaven” in all languages under the sun; he could no longer think of heaven.

Then he came to understand the look on his predecessor’s face and the drying up of the life within; then he knew all that was meant by the baffled hope that gleamed in Melmoth’s eyes; he, too, knew the thirst that burned those red lips, and the agony of a continual struggle between two natures grown to giant size.  Even yet he might be an angel, and he knew himself to be a fiend.  His was the fate of a sweet and gentle creature that a wizard’s malice has imprisoned in a misshapen form, entrapping it by a pact, so that another’s will must set it free from its detested envelope.