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Never. The obstacle which he carried in his face was frightful; but the
obstacle which he carried in his ideas was still more insurmountable.
His speech was to them more deformed than his face. He had no possible
thought in common with the world of the great and powerful, in which he
had by a freak of fate been born, and from which another freak of fate
had driven him out. There was between men and his face a mask, and
between society and his mind a wall. In mixing, from infancy, a
wandering mountebank, with that vast and tough substance which is called
the crowd, in saturating himself with the attraction of the multitude,
and impregnating himself 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.
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