and a menace to the mind; a double anxiety, the one desire, the other
fear. He had just seen these things. He had just seen Woman.

He had seen more and less than a woman; he had seen a female.

And at the same time an Olympian. The female of a god.

The mystery of sex had just been revealed to him.

And where? On inaccessible heights--at an infinite distance.

O mocking destiny! The soul, that celestial essence, he possessed; he
held it in his hand. It was Dea. Sex, that terrestrial embodiment, he
perceived in the heights of heaven. It was that woman.

A duchess!

"More than a goddess," Ursus had said.

What a precipice! Even dreams dissolved before such a perpendicular
height to escalade.

Was he going to commit the folly of dreaming about the unknown beauty?

He debated with himself.

He recalled all that Ursus had said of high stations which are almost
royal. The philosopher's disquisitions, which had hitherto seemed so
useless, now became landmarks for his thoughts. A very thin layer of
forgetfulness often lies over our memory, through which at times we
catch a glimpse of all beneath it. His fancy ran on that august world,
the peerage, to which the lady belonged, and which was so inexorably
placed above the inferior world, the common people, of which he was one.

And was he even one of the people? Was not he, the mountebank, below the
lowest of the low? For the first time since he had arrived at the age of
reflection, he felt his heart vaguely contracted by a sense of his
baseness, and of that which we nowadays call abasement. The paintings
and the catalogues of Ursus, his lyrical inventories, his dithyrambics
of castles, parks, fountains, and colonnades, his catalogues of riches
and of power, revived in the memory of Gwynplaine in the relief of
reality mingled with mist. He was possessed with the image of this
zenith. That a man should be a lord!--it seemed chimerical. It was so,
however. Incredible thing! There were lords! But were they of flesh and
blood, like ourselves? It seemed doubtful. He felt that he lay at the
bottom of all darkness, encompassed by a wall, while he could just
perceive in the far distance above his head, through the mouth of the
pit, a dazzling confusion of azure, of figures, and of rays, which was
Olympus. In the midst of this glory the duchess shone out resplendent.

He felt for this woman a strange, inexpressible longing, combined with a
conviction of the impossibility of