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.