“I.—­So much lost, you mean.

“He.—­No, no; gained.  People grow rich every moment; a day less to live, or a crown piece to the good, ’tis all one.  When the last moment comes, one is as rich as another.  Samuel Bernard, who by pillaging and stealing and playing bankrupt, leaves seven-and-twenty million francs in gold, is no better than Rameau, who leaves not a penny, and will be indebted to charity for a shroud to wrap about him.  The dead man hears not the tolling of the bell; ’tis in vain that a hundred priests bawl dirges for him, in vain that a long file of blazing torches go before.  His soul walks not by the side of the master of the funeral ceremonies.  To moulder under marble, or to moulder under clay, ’tis still to moulder.  To have around one’s bier children in red and children in blue, or to have not a creature, what matters it?”

These are the gleams of the mens divinior, that relieve the perplexing moral squalor of the portrait.  Even here we have the painful innuendo that a thought which is solemnising and holy to the noble, serves equally well to point a trait of cynical defiance in the ignoble.

Again, there is an indirectly imaginative element in the sort of terror which the thoroughness of the presentation inspires.  For indeed it is an emotion hardly short of terror that seizes us, as we listen to the stringent unflinching paradox of this heterogeneous figure.  Rameau is the squalid and tattered Satan of the eighteenth century.  He is a Mephistopheles out at elbows, a Lucifer in low water; yet always diabolic, with the bright flash of the pit in his eye.  Disgust is transformed into horror and affright by the trenchant confidence of his spirit, the daring thoroughness and consistency of his dialectic, the lurid sarcasm, the vile penetration.  He discusses a horrible action, or execrable crime, as a virtuoso examines a statue or a painting.  He has that rarest fortitude of the vicious, not to shrink from calling his character and conduct by their names.  He is one of Swift’s Yahoos, with the courage of its opinions.  He seems to give one reason for hating and dreading oneself.  The effect is of mixed fear and fascination, as of a magician whose miraculous crystal is to show us what and how we shall be twenty years from now; or as when a surgeon tells the tale of some ghastly disorder, that may at the very moment be stealthily preparing for us a doom of anguish.

Hence our dialogue is assuredly no “meat for little people nor for fools.”  Some of it is revolting in its brutal indecency.  Even Goethe’s self-possession cannot make it endurable to him.  But it is a study to be omitted by no one who judges the corruption of the old society in France an important historic subject.  The picture is very like the corruption of the old society in Rome.  We see the rotten material which the purifying flame of Jacobinism was soon to consume out of the land with fiery swiftness.