e prostrated by the
flash. Thou who standest without shrinking on the verge of a precipice,
fear lest thou be carried up on the innumerable wings of mists and
dreams. The ascent which elevates will dwarf thee. An apotheosis has a
sinister power of degradation.

It is not easy to understand what is good luck. Chance is nothing but a
disguise. Nothing deceives so much as the face of fortune. Is she
Providence? Is she Fatality?

A brightness may not be a brightness, because light is truth, and a
gleam may be a deceit. You believe that it lights you; but no, it sets
you on fire.

At night, a candle made of mean tallow becomes a star if placed in an
opening in the darkness. The moth flies to it.

In what measure is the moth responsible?

The sight of the candle fascinates the moth as the eye of the serpent
fascinates the bird.

Is it possible that the bird and the moth should resist the attraction?
Is it possible that the leaf should resist the wind? Is it possible that
the stone should refuse obedience to the laws of gravitation?

These are material questions, which are moral questions as well.

After he had received the letter of the duchess, Gwynplaine had
recovered himself. The deep love in his nature had resisted it. But the
storm having wearied itself on one side of the horizon, burst out on the
other; for in destiny, as in nature, there are successive convulsions.
The first shock loosens, the second uproots.

Alas! how do the oaks fall?

Thus he who, when a child of ten, stood alone on the shore of Portland,
ready to give battle, who had looked steadfastly at all the combatants
whom he had to encounter, the blast which bore away the vessel in which
he had expected to embark, the gulf which had swallowed up the plank,
the yawning abyss, of which the menace was its retrocession, the earth
which refused him a shelter, the sky which refused him a star, solitude
without pity, obscurity without notice, ocean, sky, all the violence of
one infinite space, and all the mysterious enigmas of another; he who
had neither trembled nor fainted before the mighty hostility of the
unknown; he who, still so young, had held his own with night, as
Hercules of old had held his own with death; he who in the unequal
struggle had thrown down this defiance, that he, a child, adopted a
child, that he encumbered himself with a load, when tired and exhausted,
thus rendering himself an easier prey to the attacks on his weakness,
and,