Thus it was that he had been
fortified. In one sense his miseries had seemed unreal, because all was
the same in the outward scene. It was as though it all said to him: "It
is a dream that those you love have vanished, that ill-fortune sits by
your fireside. One night you will go to bed thinking that wife and child
have gone, that your treasury is nearly empty; and in the morning you
will wake up and find your loved ones sitting in their accustomed places,
and your treasury will be full to overflowing as of old."
So it was while the picture of his home scene remained unbroken and
serene; but the hideous mass of last night's holocaust was now before his
eyes, with little streams of smoke rising from the cindered pile, and a
hundred things with which his eyes had been familiar lay distorted,
excoriated and useless. He realized with sudden completeness that a
terrible change bad come in his life, that a cyclone had ruined the face
of his created world.
This picture did more to open up Jean Jacques' eyes to his real position
in life than anything he had experienced, than any sorrow he had
suffered. He had been in torment in the past, but he had refused to see
that he was in Hades. Now it was as though he had been led through the
streets of Hell by some dark spirit, while in vain he looked round for
his old friends Kant and Hegel, Voltaire and Rousseau and Rochefoucauld,
Plato and Aristotle.
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