CHAPTER XVII.
THE _REMEDIUM_.
We have seen that for Claude, as he hurried from the bridge, the faces he met in the narrow streets of the old town were altered by the medium through which he viewed them; and appeared gloomy, sordid and fanatical.
In the eyes of Blondel, who had passed that way before him, the same faces wore a look of selfishness, stupendously and heartlessly cruel.
And not the faces only; the very houses and ways, the blue sky overhead, and the snow-peaks--when for an instant he caught sight of them--bore the same aspect.

All wore their every-day air, and mocked the despair in his heart.

All flung in his teeth the fact, the incredible fact, that whether he died or lived, stayed or went, the world would proceed; that the eternal hills, ay, and the insensate bricks and mortar, that had seen his father pass, would see him pass, and would be standing when he was gone into the darkness.
There are few things that to the mind of man in his despondent moods are more strange, or more shocking, than the permanence of trifles.

The small things to which his brain and his hand have given shape, which he can, if he will, crush out of form, and resolve into their primitive atoms, outlive him! They lie on the table when he is gone, are unchanged by his removal, serve another master as they have served him, preach to another generation the same lesson.

The face is dust, but the canvas smiles from the wall.