" he cried.

He felt like one whose head rises out of the water. It seemed to him
that he saw everything--the past, the future, the present--in the
accession of a sudden flash of light.

"Oh!" he cried, for there are cries in the depths of thought. "Oh! it
was so, was it! I was a lord. All is discovered. They stole, betrayed,
destroyed, abandoned, disinherited, murdered me! The corpse of my
destiny floated fifteen years on the sea; all at once it touched the
earth, and it started up, erect and living. I am reborn. I am born. I
felt under my rags that the breast there palpitating was not that of a
wretch; and when I looked on crowds of men, I felt that they were the
flocks, and that I was not the dog, but the shepherd! Shepherds of the
people, leaders of men, guides and masters, such were my fathers; and
what they were I am! I am a gentleman, and I have a sword; I am a baron,
and I have a casque; I am a marquis, and I have a plume; I am a peer,
and I have a coronet. Lo! they deprived me of all this. I dwelt in
light, they flung me into darkness. Those who proscribed the father,
sold the son. When my father was dead, they took from beneath his head
the stone of exile which he had placed for his pillow, and, tying it to
my neck, they flung me into a sewer. Oh! those scoundrels who tortured
my infancy! Yes, they rise and move in the depths of my memory. Yes; I
see them again. I was that morsel of flesh pecked to pieces on a tomb by
a flight of crows. I bled and cried under all those horrible shadows.
Lo! it was there that they precipitated me, under the crush of those who
come and go, under the trampling feet of men, under the undermost of the
human race, lower than the serf, baser than the serving man, lower than
the felon, lower than the slave, at the spot where Chaos becomes a
sewer, in which I was engulfed. It is from thence that I come; it is
from this that I rise; it is from this that I am risen. And here I am
now. Quits!"

He sat down, he rose, clasped his head with his hands, began to pace the
room again, and his tempestuous monologue continued within him.

"Where am I?--on the summit? Where is it that I have just alighted?--on
the highest peak? This pinnacle, this grandeur, this dome of the world,
this great power, is my home. This temple is in air. I am one of the
gods. I live in inaccessible heights. This supremacy, which I looked up
to from below, and from whence emanated such rays of glory that I shut
my ey