But did he himself, for example, consider himself above or only on a level with humanity? Ah! there is the intimate thought of each of the noble copies of baked clay which a God formerly modeled on the shores of the Tigris: I and the others, I and men, I and the rest, etc. It is thanks to this process that one judges, that one writes the novel or the story, that one rails in comedies or in shorter pleasantries. Judging is the universal and the particular, it is everything, it is life. Is not the famous tribunal, the tribunal of consciousness, with egoism for presiding judge and vices for assessors? And Hubert judged too: in defiance of all reason, he weighed the imponderable and fathomed the impenetrable, that is to say, the thoughts of others, without reflecting that one can know nothing outside of oneself and that to judge men, in short, is to judge the idea we have of men. Like the first of these prisoners, he had let himself be caught in the snare of reality: scoffing at those who sought happiness, he scoffed at himself, for what had he done since his birth in this world of sensibility except to consume the best part of his force in this quest? Vain and vainer than ever now that he was straying towards the external clouds. To what did he pretend, in loving Sixtine, and the yielding clouds dispersed, would he enjoy himself just as well with the fundamental night? When he broke the dear head between two stones, would he see what was within? One can doubtless use more human means and, for example, inoffensive fascination. He returned to his preceding revery and the circle was closed; decidedly he must not reflect, he must act. He found himself in excellent humor and quite ready, this time, to count without boredom the quarter hours on the clocks of the streets. He would even have willingly laughed with some chance companion, or considered the toddling of women, or strolled past diverting pictures. The Louvre, which he perceived from the other side of the stream, tempted him: he went to see once more the striking Clytemnestra so drolly illuminated with a torch and he was soon amusing himself in this room which, in previous days, he would have called a corner of shame. It did not equal, for comic intensity, the terrible Hogarths and the distressing Daumiers, but David and his school, nevertheless, had ridiculed antiquity successfully. The sober Flaxman had never succeeded in delineating personages so completely stupefied at having been cut out by a punch. Entragues had once said that to make place for this foreign exhibition the paintings of the masters of an immoral nudity had been hidden in closets: it was the secret cabinet of the guards of the People's paintings. There remained to determine if bad paintings has not its own immorality and if the _Serment des Horaces_ should not be put under key as well as the _Atalante et Méléagre_, the Parrhasius, perhaps a little exciting, in which Tiberius delighted?