"Do you know what you are thinking, child?" he said, smiling."I will tell you: 'So all that lovely rosewood furniture that I coveted so much, and the pretty dresses that I used to try on, are mine now! All on easy terms that Madame refused, I do no know why.My word! if Imight drive about in a carriage, have jewels and pretty things, a box at the theatre, and put something by! with me he should lead a life of pleasure fit to kill him if he were not as strong as a Turk! I never saw such a man!'--Was not that just what you were thinking," he went on, and something in his voice made Jenny turn pale."Well, yes, child; you could not stand it, and I am sending you away for your own good; you would perish in the attempt.Come, let us part good friends," and he coolly dismissed her with a very small sum of money.
The first use that Castanier had promised himself that he would make of the terrible power brought at the price of his eternal happiness, was the full and complete indulgence of all his tastes.
He first put his affairs in order, readily settled his accounts with M.de Nucingen, who found a worthy German to succeed him, and then determined on a carouse worthy of the palmiest days of the Roman Empire.He plunged into dissipation as recklessly as Belshazzar of old went to that last feast in Babylon.Like Belshazzar, he saw clearly through his revels a gleaming hand that traced his doom in letters of flame, not on the narrow walls of the banqueting-chamber, but over the vast spaces of heaven that the rainbow spans.His feast was not, indeed, an orgy confined within the limits of a banquet, for he squandered all the powers of soul and body in exhausting all the pleasures of earth.The table was in some sort earth itself, the earth that trembled beneath his feet.His was the last festival of the reckless spendthrift who has thrown all prudence to the winds.The devil had given him the key of the storehouse of human pleasures; he had filled and refilled his hands, and he was fast nearing the bottom.
In a moment he had felt all that that enormous power could accomplish;in a moment he had exercised it, proved it, wearied of it.What had hitherto been the sum of human desires became as nothing.So often it happens that with possession the vast poetry of desire must end, and the thing possessed is seldom the thing that we dreamed of.
Beneath Melmoth's omnipotence lurked this tragical anticlimax of so many a passion, and now the inanity of human nature was revealed to his successor, to whom infinite power brought Nothingness as a dowry.
To come to a clear understanding of Castanier's strange position, it must be borne in mind how suddenly these revolutions of thought and feeling had been wrought; how quickly they had succeeded each other;and of these things it is hard to give any idea to those who have never broken the prison bonds of time, and space, and distance.His relation to the world without had been entirely changed with the expansion of his faculties.
Like Melmoth himself, Castanier could travel in a few moments over the fertile plains of India, could soar on the wings of demons above African desert spaces, or skim the surface of the seas.The same insight that could read the inmost thoughts of others, could apprehend at a glance the nature of any material object, just as he caught as it were all flavors at once upon his tongue.He took his pleasure like a despot; a blow of the axe felled the tree that he might eat its fruits.The transitions, the alternations that measure joy and pain, and diversify human happiness, no longer existed for him.He had so completely glutted his appetites that pleasure must overpass the limits of pleasure to tickle a palate cloyed with satiety, and suddenly grown fastidious beyond all measure, so that ordinary pleasures became distasteful.Conscious that at will he was the master of all the women that he could desire, knowing that his power was irresistible, he did not care to exercise it; they were pliant to his unexpressed wishes, to his most extravagant caprices, until he felt a horrible thirst for love, and would have love beyond their power to give.
The world refused him nothing save faith and prayer, the soothing and consoling love that is not of this world.He was obeyed--it was a horrible position.
The torrents of pain, and pleasure, and thought that shook his soul and his bodily frame would have overwhelmed the strongest human being;but in him there was a power of vitality proportioned to the power of the sensations that assailed him.He felt within him a vague immensity of longing that earth could not satisfy.He spent his days on outspread wings, longing to traverse the luminous fields of space to other spheres that he knew afar by intuitive perception, a clear and hopeless knowledge.His soul dried up within him, for he hungered and thirsted after things that can neither be drunk nor eaten, but for which he could not choose but crave.His lips, like Melmoth's, burned with desire; he panted for the unknown, for he knew all things.
The mechanism and the scheme of the world was apparent to him, and its working interested him no longer; he did not long disguise the profound scorn that makes of a man of extraordinary powers a sphinx who knows everything and says nothing, and sees all things with an unmoved countenance.He felt not the slightest wish to communicate his knowledge to other men.He was rich with all the wealth of the world, with one effort he could make the circle of the globe, and riches and power were meaningless for him.He felt the awful melancholy of omnipotence, a melancholy which Satan and God relieve by the exercise of infinite power in mysterious ways known to them alone.Castanier had not, like his Master, the inextinguishable energy of hate and malice; he felt that he was a devil, but a devil whose time was not yet come, while Satan is a devil through all eternity, and being damned beyond redemption, delights to stir up the world, like a dung heap, with his triple fork and to thwart therein the designs of God.
