social pressure,
and turned to hate. On the face of an old woman he saw starvation; on
that of a girl, prostitution. The same fact, and although the girl had
the resource of her youth, all the sadder for that! In the crowd were
arms without tools; the workers asked only for work, but the work was
wanting. Sometimes a soldier came and seated himself by the workmen,
sometimes a wounded pensioner; and Gwynplaine saw the spectre of war.
Here Gwynplaine read want of work; there man-farming, slavery. On
certain brows he saw an indescribable ebbing back towards animalism, and
that slow return of man to beast, produced on those below by the dull
pressure of the happiness of those above. There was a break in the gloom
for Gwynplaine. He and Dea had a loophole of happiness; the rest was
damnation. Gwynplaine felt above him the thoughtless trampling of the
powerful, the rich, the magnificent, the great, the elect of chance.
Below he saw the pale faces of the disinherited. He saw himself and Dea,
with their little happiness, so great to themselves, between two worlds.
That which was above went and came, free, joyous, dancing, trampling
under foot; above him the world which treads, below the world which is
trodden upon. It is a fatal fact, and one indicating a profound social
evil, that light should crush the shadow! Gwynplaine thoroughly grasped
this dark evil. What! a destiny so reptile? Shall a man drag himself
thus along with such adherence to dust and corruption, with such vicious
tastes, such an abdication of right, or such abjectness that one feels
inclined to crush him under foot? Of what butterfly is, then, this
earthly life the grub?

What! in the crowd which hungers and which denies everywhere, and before
all, the questions of crime and shame (the inflexibility of the law
producing laxity of conscience), is there no child that grows but to be
stunted, no virgin but matures for sin, no rose that blooms but for the
slime of the snail?

His eyes at times sought everywhere, with the curiosity of emotion, to
probe the depths of that darkness, in which there died away so many
useless efforts, and in which there struggled so much weariness:
families devoured by society, morals tortured by the laws, wounds
gangrened by penalties, poverty gnawed by taxes, wrecked intelligence
swallowed up by ignorance, rafts in distress alive with the famished,
feuds, dearth, death-rattles, cries, disappearances. He felt the vague
oppression of