The Count of Monte Cristo

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are yourself no longer; you who, like Ariel, verge on the angelic, are
but an inert mass, which, like Caliban, verges on the brutal; and this
is called in human tongues, as I tell you, neither more nor less than
apoplexy. Come, if so you will, count, and continue this conversation
at my house, any day you may be willing to see an adversary capable of
understanding and anxious to refute you, and I will show you my father,
M. Noirtier de Villefort, one of the most fiery Jacobins of the French
Revolution; that is to say, he had the most remarkable audacity,
seconded by a most powerful organization--a man who has not, perhaps,
like yourself seen all the kingdoms of the earth, but who has helped to
overturn one of the greatest; in fact, a man who believed himself,
like you, one of the envoys, not of God, but of a supreme being; not of
providence, but of fate. Well, sir, the rupture of a blood-vessel on the
lobe of the brain has destroyed all this, not in a day, not in an hour,
but in a second. M. Noirtier, who, on the previous night, was the old
Jacobin, the old senator, the old Carbonaro, laughing at the guillotine,
the cannon, and the dagger--M. Noirtier, playing with revolutions--M.