of the duel he was fighting with himself since his passion for
gold had turned to his own injury,--a species of uncompleted suicide
which kept him at once in the miseries of life and in those of death.

Never was a Vice more punished by itself. A miser, locked by accident
into the subterranean strong-room that contains his treasures, has, like
Sardanapalus, the happiness of dying in the midst of his wealth. But
Cornelius, the robber and the robbed, knowing the secret of neither the
one nor the other, possessed and did not possess his treasure,--a
novel, fantastic, but continually terrible torture. Sometimes, becoming
forgetful, he would leave the little gratings of his door wide open,
and then the passers in the street could see that already wizened man,
planted on his two legs in the midst of his untilled garden, absolutely
motionless, and casting on those who watched him a fixed gaze, the
insupportable light of which froze them with terror. If, by chance, he
walked through the streets of Tours, he seemed like a stranger in them;
he knew not where he was, nor whether the sun or the moon were shining.
Often he would ask his way of those who passed him, believing that he
was still in Ghent, and seeming to be in search of something lost.

The most perennial and the best materialized of human ideas, the idea
by which man reproduces himself by creating outside of himself the
fictitious being called Property, that mental demon, drove its steel
claws perpetually into his heart. Then, in the midst of this torture,
Fear arose, with all its accompanying sentiments. Two men had his
secret, the secret he did not know himself. Louis XI. or Coyctier could
post men to watch him during his sleep and discover the unknown gulf
into which he had cast his riches,--those riches he had watered with the
blood of so many innocent men. And then, beside his fear, arose Remorse.

In order to prevent during his lifetime the abduction of his hidden
treasure, he took the most cruel precautions against sleep; besides
which, his commercial relations put him in the way of obtaining powerful
anti-narcotics. His struggles to keep awake were awful--alone with
night, silence, Remorse, and Fear, with all the thoughts that man,
instinctively perhaps, has best embodied--obedient thus to a moral truth
as yet devoid of actual proof.

At last this man so powerful, this heart so hardened by political and
commercial life, this genius, obscure in history, succu