And, as he thus sifted his soul to the bottom, when he perceived how large a space Nature had prepared there for the passions, he sneered more bitterly still. He stirred up in the depths of his heart all his hatred, all his malevolence, and he discovered with the cool eye of physician examining a patient, that this hatred, this malevolence, were but vitiated love, the source of every virtue in man, turned to horrible things in the heart of a priest, and that a man constituted as he was, by making himself a priest, made himself a demon. Then he laughed frightfully, and suddenly became pale again, in contemplating the worst side of his fatal passion, of that corroding, venomous, malignant, implacable love, which had driven one of them to the gibbet, the other to hell-fire, for her to condemnation, him to damnation.
Victor Hugo, “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”
