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Countess Julie 55
them. That was the garden of paradise ; and there stood
many angry angels with flaming swords protecting it ;
but
for all that I and other boys found the way to the tree of
life now you despise me. ... I thought if it is true
that the thief on the cross could enter heaven and dwell
among the angels it was strange that a pauper child on
God s earth could not go into the castle park and play
with the Countess daughter. . . . What I wanted I
don t know. You were unattainable, but through the
vision of you I was made to realize how hopeless it was
to rise above the conditions of my birth.
What rich food for thought in the above for
all of us, and for the Jeans, the people who do
not know what they want, yet feel the cruelty of
a world that keeps the pauper s child out of the
castle of his dreams, away from joy and play
and beauty! The injustice and the bitterness of
it all, that places the stigma of birth as an im
passable obstacle, a fatal imperative excluding one
from the table of life, with the result of producing
such terrible effects on the Julies and the Jeans.
The one unnerved, made helpless and useless by
affluence, ease and idleness; the other enslaved and
bound by service and dependence. Even when
Jean wants to, he cannot rise above his condi
tion. When Julie asks him to embrace her, to
love her, he replies:
I can t as long as we are in this house. . . . There
is the Count, your father. ... I need only to see his
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