ty times in imbecile feats, and never experience the least
ill-effect; another will deliberately venture it in an honourable
cause, and lose it without hope of return. To help the first,
thousands of unknown people, who never have seen him, will be obscurely
working; to hinder the second, thousands of unknown people labour, who
are ignorant of his existence. And all, on the one side as well as the
other, are totally unaware of what they are doing; they obey the same
minute, widely-distributed order; and at the prescribed moment the
detached pieces of the mysterious machine join, dovetail, unite; and we
have two complete and dissimilar destinies set into motion by Time.

In a curious book on "Chance and Destiny," Dr. Foissac gives various
strange examples of the persistent, inexplicable, fundamental,
pre-ordained, irreducible iniquity in which many existences are
steeped. As we go through page after page, we feel almost as though we
were being conducted through the disconcerting laboratories of another
world where, in the absence of every instrument that human justice and
reason might hold indispensable, happiness and sorrow are being
parcelled out and allotted. Take, for instance, the life of
Vauvenargues, one of the most admirable of men, and certainly, of all
the great sages, the most unfortunate. Whenever his fortune hangs in
the balance, he is attacked and prostrated by cruel disease; and
notwithstanding the efforts of his genius, his bravery, his moral
beauty, day after day he is wantonly betrayed or falls victim to
gratuitous injustice; and at the age of thirty-two he dies, at the very
moment when recognition is at last awaiting his work. So too there is
the terrible story of Lesurques,[1] in which we see a thousand
coincidences that might have been contrived in hell, blending and
joining together to work the ruin of an innocent man; while truth,
chained down by fate, dumbly shrieking, as we do when wrestling with
nightmare, is unable to put forth a single gesture that shall rend the
veil of night. There is Aimar de Ransonnet, President of the
Parliament of Paris, one of the most upright of men, who first of all
is suddenly dismissed from his office, sees his daughter die on a
dunghill before his eyes, his son perish at the hands of the
executioner, and his wife struck by lightning; while he himself is
accused of heresy and sent to the Bastille, where he dies of grief
before he is brought to trial.

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