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Inexorable balance-sheet! He went throughout the supreme vision in which
his mind had been plunged. He examined successively destiny, situation,
society, and himself. What was destiny? A snare. Situation? Despair.
Society? Hatred. And himself? A defeated man. In the depths of his soul
he cried. Society is the stepmother, Nature is the mother. Society is
the world of the body, Nature is the world of the soul. The one tends to
the coffin, to the deal box in the grave, to the earth-worms, and ends
there. The other tends to expanded wings, to transformation into the
morning light, to ascent into the firmament, and there revives into new
life.
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.
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