Some time before this, however, Prometheus has arrived, and dined with Cocles and Damocles in a Paris restaurant. He finds Cocles discoursing in perplexity on the meaningless blow he had received from the unknown stranger, and he himself unwittingly becomes the cause of a second and still more distressing accident to Cocles. The conversation having turned on his eagle, Cocles and Damocles express their desire to see it, and Prometheus calls it from afar, whereupon “bursting through the window, it put out Cocles’ eye with one stroke with its wing, and then, chirruping as it did so, tenderly indeed but imperiously, fell with a swoop upon Prometheus’ right side. And Prometheus forthwith undid his waistcoat and offered his liver to the bird.” For the moment, however, we may leave Prometheus. The important event just now is the damage to Cocles’ eye. Neither the undeserved blow nor the accident to his eye ultimately causes misery as the undeserved £20 causes Damocles misery. When he sees Damocles’ misery on his death-bed, Cocles comments: “There you see the fate of a man who has grown rich by another’s suffering.” “But is it true that you suffer?” Prometheus asks him. “From my eye occasionally,” said Cocles, “but from the blow no more; I prefer to have received it. It does not burn any more; it has revealed to me my goodness. I am flattered by it; I am pleased about it. I never cease to think that my pain was useful to my neighbour and that it brought him £20.” “But the neighbour is dying of it,” said Prometheus.... It is clear that M. Gide has not taken it as his province to justify the ways of God to man. I fancy he suspects Zeus of having acted without a motive on many previous occasions before the strange adventure of the boulevard. He is also clearly amused by the workings of the human conscience. If Damocles had not had a conscience, he would not have died.