Here is a man more powerful than all the kings on earth put together;
a man who, like Satan, could wrestle with God Himself; leaning against
one of the pillars in the Church of Saint-Sulpice, weighed down by
the feelings and thoughts that oppressed him, and absorbed in the
thought of a Future, the same thought that had engulfed Melmoth.

"He was very happy, was Melmoth!" cried Castanier. "He died in the
certain knowledge that he would go to heaven."

In a moment the greatest possible change had been wrought in the
cashier's ideas. For several days he had been a devil, now he was
nothing but a man; an image of the fallen Adam, of the sacred
tradition embodied in all cosmogonies. But while he had thus shrunk he
retained a germ of greatness, he had been steeped in the Infinite. The
power of hell had revealed the divine power. He thirsted for heaven as
he had never thirsted after the pleasures of earth, that are so soon
exhausted. The enjoyments which the fiend promises are but the
enjoyments of earth on a larger scale, but to the joys of heaven there
is no limit. He believed in God, and the spell that gave him the
treasures of the world was as nothing to him now; the treasures
themselves seemed to him as contemptible as pebbles to an admirer of
diamonds; they were but gewgaws compared with the eternal glories of
the other life. A curse lay, he thought, on all things that came to
him from this source. He sounded dark depths of painful thought as he
listened to the service performed for Melmoth. The _Dies irae_ filled
him with awe; he felt all the grandeur of that cry of a repentant soul
trembling before the Throne of God. The Holy Spirit, like a devouring
flame, passed through him as fire consumes straw.