r. And Lesurques, it may be, was
deficient in ability, in one knows not what, in that prodigious
personal force that one expects to find in falsely-accused innocence.
Nor can it be denied that the Stuarts, no less than Joseph II. and
Marie-Antoinette, were guilty of enormous blunders that invited
disaster; or that Lauzun, Casanova, and Lord Chesterfield had flung to
the winds those essential scruples that hinder the honest man. So too
is it certain that although the existence of Sylla, Marius, Dionysius
the Elder, and Herod the Ascalonite may have been externally almost
incomparably fortunate, few men, I fancy, would care to have lurking
within them the strange, restless, blood-stained phantom, possessed
neither of thought nor of feeling, on which the happiness must depend
(if the word happiness be indeed applicable here) that is founded upon
unceasing crime. But, this deduction being made, and on the most
reasonable, most liberal scale (which will become the more generous as
we see more of life and understand it better, and penetrate further
into the secrets of little causes and great effects), we shall still be
forced to admit that there remains, in these obstinately recurring
coincidences, in these indissoluble series of good or evil fortune,
these persistent runs of good or bad luck, a considerable, often
essential, and sometimes exclusive share that can be ascribed only to
the impenetrable, incontrovertible will of a real but unknown power;
which is known as Chance, Fatality, Destiny, Luck, Fortune, good or
evil Star, Angel with the White Wings, Angel with the Black Wings, and
by many other names, that vary in accordance with the more or less
imaginative, more or less poetic genius of centuries and peoples. And
here we have one of the most serious, most perplexing problems of all
those that have to be solved by man before he may legitimately regard
himself as the principal, independent and irrevocable inhabitant of
this earth.

7

Let us reduce the problem to its simplest terms, and submit it to our
reason. First, however, let us consider whether it affects man alone.
We have with us, upon this curiously incomprehensible globe, silent and
faithful companions of our existence; and we shall often find it
helpful to let our eyes rest upon these when, having reached certain
altitudes that perhaps are illusory, giddiness seizes our brain and
inclines us too readily to the idea that the stars, the gods or the
v