kest vault of the human
Erebus and binds despairing hearts to hearts that are monstrous. Manon
through the infinite sends to Cartouche a smile ineffable as that with
which Everallin entranced Fingal. From one pole of misery to the other,
from one gehenna to another, from the galleys to the brothel, tenebrous
mouths wildly exchange the kiss of azure.

It is night. The monstrous ditch of Clamart opens. From it arises a
miasm, a phosphorescent glow. It shines and flickers in two separate
tarts; it takes shape, the head rejoins the body, it is a phantom; the
phantom gazes into the darkness with wild, baleful eyes, rises, grows
bigger and blue, hovers for an instant and then speeds away to the
zenith to open the door of the palace of the sun where butterflies flit
from flower to flower and angels flit from star to star.

In all these strange, concordant phenomena appears the inadmissibility
of the principle that is all of man. The mysterious marriage which we
have just related, marriage of servitude with captivity, exaggerates the
ideal from the very fact that it is weighed down by all the most hideous
burdens of destiny. A frightful combination! It is the From it rises a
miasm, a phosphorescent glow. It shines meeting of these two redoubtable
words in which human existence is summed up: enjoy and suffer.

Alas! And how can we prevent this cry from escaping us? For these
hapless ones, enjoy, laugh, sing, please, and love exist, persist; but
there is a death-rattle in sing, a grating sound in laugh, putrefaction
in enjoy, there are ashes in please, there is night in love. All these
joys are attached to their destiny by coffin-nails.

What does that matter? They thirst for these lugubrious, chimerical
glimpses of light that are full of dreams.

What is tobacco, that is so precious and so dear to the prisoner? It
is a dream. "Put me in the dungeon," said a convict, "but give me some
tobacco." In other words: "Throw me into a pit, but give me a palace."
Press the prostitute and the bandit, mix Tartarus and Avernus, stir the
fatal vat of social mire, pile all the deformities of matter together,
and what issues therefrom? The immaterial.

The ideal is the Greek fire of the gutter. It burns there. Its
brightness in the impure water dazzles the thinker and touches his
heart. Nini Lassive stirs and brightens with Fiesehi's bilets-doux that
sombre lamp of Vesta which is in the heart of every woman, and which
is as inextinguishab