From this,
forces result which are sometimes brought to light by magnetism,
though they are far more frequently lost in the vague spaces of the
spiritual world. It is rare to find a deformed person who is not
gifted with some special faculty,--a whimsical or sparkling gaiety
perhaps, an utter malignity, or an almost sublime goodness. Like
instruments which the hand of art can never fully waken, these beings,
highly privileged though they know it not, live within themselves, as
Butscha lived, provided their natural forces so magnificently
concentrated have not been spent in the struggle they have been forced
to maintain, against tremendous odds, to keep alive. This explains
many superstitions, the popular legends of gnomes, frightful dwarfs,
deformed fairies,--all that race of bottles, as Rabelais called them,
containing elixirs and precious balms.
Butscha, therefore, had very nearly found the key to the puzzle. With
all the anxious solicitude of a hopeless lover, a vassal ever ready to
die,--like the soldiers alone and abandoned in the snows of Russia,
who still cried out, "Long live the Emperor,"--he meditated how to
capture Modeste's secret for his own private knowledge.
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