excessive because, long dormant, they awoke furious. One of them,
after re-reading "Venice Preserved," and admiring the sublime union of
Pierre and Jaffier, began to reflect on the virtues shown by men who
are outlawed by society, on the honesty of galley-slaves, the
faithfulness of thieves among each other, the privileges of exorbitant
power which such men know how to win by concentrating all ideas into a
single will. He saw that Man is greater than men. He concluded that
society ought to belong wholly to those distinguished beings who, to
natural intelligence, acquired wisdom, and fortune, add a fanaticism
hot enough to fuse into one casting these different forces. That done,
their occult power, vast in action and in intensity, against which the
social order would be helpless, would cast down all obstacles, blast
all other wills, and give to each the devilish power of all. This
world apart within the world, hostile to the world, admitting none of
the world's ideas, not recognizing any law, not submitting to any
conscience but that of necessity, obedient to a devotion only, acting
with every faculty for a single associate when one of their number
asked for the assistance of all,--this life of filibusters in lemon
kid gloves and cabriolets; this intimate union of superior beings,
cold and sarcastic, smiling and cursing in the midst of a false and
puerile society; this certainty of forcing all things to serve an end,
of plotting a vengeance that could not fail of living in thirteen
hearts; this happiness of nurturing a secret hatred in the face of
men, and of being always in arms against this; this ability to
withdraw to the sanctuary of self with one idea more than even the
most remarkable of men could have,--this religion of pleasure and
egotism cast so strong a spell over Thirteen men that they revived the
society of Jesuits to the profit of the devil.

It was horrible and stupendous; but the compact was made, and it