He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly beholding himself.  He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies could not have been handier in using them.  From Alvan to Alvan, they signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters to dust the pride of the works of men.  He was down among them, lower than the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him, became of monstrous distortion.  O fool! dolt! blind ass! tottering idiot! drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!—­Clotilde!  Clotilde!  Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his hand, and flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble?  Fish, fool, fish! and fish till Doomsday!  There’s nothing but your fool’s face in the water to be got to bite at the bait you throw, fool!  Fish for the flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom’s head!  What impious villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he might have it bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the ceremonies!  They laugh!  By Orcus! how they laugh!  The laughter of the gods is the lightning of death’s irony over mortals.  Can they have a finer subject than a giant gone fool?

Tears burst from him:  tears of rage, regret, selflashing.  O for yesterday!  He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed, groaned.  A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons, having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his private dignity in order.  He was the same in his letters—­a Cyclops hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck.  Dignity was cast off; he came out naked.  Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to the friend nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him, were dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with all the truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of the woman, was the ground of his anguish.  Each antecedent of his career had been a step of strength and success departed.  The woman was but a fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive, yet she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be himself once more:  and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full tide and she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she became a melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.

The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force.  The giant in him loved her warmly.  Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted water, swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers