Ile
de Paris--or historically and pre-eminently the 'Cite de Paris'--is,
when understood deeply, the precise counter-corruption of the religion
of the Sainte Chapelle, just as the worst forms of bodily and mental
ruin are the corruption of love. I have therefore called it 'Fiction
mecroyante,' with literal accuracy and precision; according to the
explanation of the word which the reader may find in any good French
dictionary,[157] and round its Arctic pole in the Morgue, he may gather
into one Caina of gelid putrescence the entire product of modern infidel
imagination, amusing itself with destruction of the body, and busying
itself with aberration of the mind.

Aberration, palsy, or plague, observe, as distinguished from normal
evil, just as the venom of rabies or cholera differs from that of a wasp
or a viper. The life of the insect and serpent deserves, or at least
permits, our thoughts; not so, the stages of agony in the fury-driven
hound. There is some excuse, indeed, for the pathologic labour of the
modern novelist in the fact that he cannot easily, in a city population,
find a healthy mind to vivisect: but the greater part of such amateur
surgery is the struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to
obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and colour in
healthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits
described exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight:
and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced
by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the
faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled
into senseless change like the wards of a Chubb lock.

V. It is needless to insist on the vast field for this dice-cast or
card-dealt calamity which opens itself in the ignorance, money-interest,
and mean passion, of city marriage. Peasants know each other as
children--meet, as they grow up in testing labour; and if a stout
farmer's son marries a handless girl, it is his own fault. Also in the
patrician families of the field, the young people know what they are
doing, and marry a neighbouring estate, or a covetable title, with some
conception of the responsibilities they undertake. But even among these,
their season in the confused metropolis creates licentious and
fortuitous temptation before unknown; and in the lower middle orders, an
entirely new kingdom of discomfort and disgrace has been preac