eretofore.

When the men who have shown such energy on the battlefield return to
ordinary civilization, most of those who have not risen to high rank
seem to have acquired no ideas, and to have no aptitude, no capacity,
for grasping new ideas. To the utter amazement of a younger generation,
those who made our armies so glorious and so terrible are as simple as
children, and as slow-witted as a clerk at his worst, and the captain of
a thundering squadron is scarcely fit to keep a merchant's day-book. Old
soldiers of this stamp, therefore being innocent of any attempt to
use their reasoning faculties, act upon their strongest impulses.
Castanier's crime was one of those matters that raise so many questions,
that, in order to debate about it, a moralist might call for its
"discussion by clauses," to make use of a parliamentary expression.

Passion had counseled the crime; the cruelly irresistible power of
feminine witchery had driven him to commit it; no man can say of
himself, "I will never do that," when a siren joins in the combat and
throws her spells over him.

So the word of life fell upon a conscience newly awakened to the truths
of religion which the French Revolution and a soldier's career had
forced Castanier to neglect. The solemn words, "You will be happy or
miserable for all eternity!" made but the more terrible impression upon
him, because he had exhausted earth and shaken it like a barren tree;
because his desires could effect all things, so that it was enough that
any spot in earth or heaven should be forbidden him, and he forthwith
thought of nothing else. If it were allowable to compare such great
things with social follies, Castanier's position was not unlike that of
a banker who, finding that his all-powerful millions cannot obtain for
him an entrance into the society of the noblesse, must set his heart
upon entering that circle, and all the social privileges that he has
already acquired are as nothing in his eyes from the moment when he
discovers that a single one is lacking.

Here is a man more powerful than all the kings on earth put together; a
man who, like Satan, could wrestle with God Himself; leaning against
one of the pillars in the Church of Saint-Sulpice, weighed down by the
feelings and thoughts that oppressed him, and absorbed in the thought of
a Future, the same thought that had engulfed Melmoth.

"He was very happy, was Melmoth!" cried Castanier. "He died in the
certain knowledge tha