A glance into the past showed it to him, as a type
completely realized in Foedora.
He would no more meet with sympathy here for his bodily ills than he
had received it at her hands for the distress in his heart. The
fashionable world expels every suffering creature from its midst, just
as the body of a man in robust health rejects any germ of disease. The
world holds suffering and misfortune in abhorrence; it dreads them
like the plague; it never hesitates between vice and trouble, for vice
is a luxury. Ill-fortune may possess a majesty of its own, but society
can belittle it and make it ridiculous by an epigram. Society draws
caricatures, and in this way flings in the teeth of fallen kings the
affronts which it fancies it has received from them; society, like the
Roman youth at the circus, never shows mercy to the fallen gladiator;
mockery and money are its vital necessities. "Death to the weak!" That
is the oath taken by this kind of Equestrian order, instituted in
their midst by all the nations of the world; everywhere it makes for
the elevation of the rich, and its motto is deeply graven in hearts
that wealth has turned to stone, or that have been reared in
aristocratic prejudices.
Assemble a collection of school-boys together.
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