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spirit shone in the little vagabond. Charlie — against whom every man's hand was turned, who had no place of his own upon this earth, for whom there was no love, nor any of the natural rights of man — Charlie was unconquerable. All the social cruelties and callousness of his day and age bewildered him; the great hand of destiny reached out to crush him between destructive greedy fingers. Charlie could not be crushed. And, even at the end when, as Verdoux, he was condemned to death, it was Society itself that was condemned. Even in death, Charlie triumphed over his dragon; and in so doing won a notable victory over everything that seeks to enslave and debase the human spirit.
Charlie seemed a puny David; but the potency of his weapons of satire and ridicule were shown by the howls of rage and pain and fear that came from the Goliaths he attacked. Charlie never changed, only expressed himself more clearly, more pungently, grew increasingly to the stature of a colossus.
Charlie is kin to all the heroes of mythology, and shares their unalterable destiny; but he is twin brother to Don Quixote, that knight of the sad countenance. The shabby knight is the shabby tramp, and both have elegance. In both burns the same fire of chivalry, both set forth on the same quest for the ideal, both built for themselves fantastic worlds nearer the ideal than reality could ever come. In both, truth and candour, gentleness and compassion dwelt side by side with inflexibility of will and purpose. Only Don Quixote was not so lonely. Rosinante and Sancho Panza, in their different ways, offered him fellowship. Charlie pursued his quest alone, unloved, sustained only by the intensity of his inner life.
Even when the establishment of talkies forced him into speech, the demand for Charlie was still universal — Monsieur Verdoux was given a special sound track in Hindustani; the dubbing was undertaken by a company in South Africa, and after its release in that country, the translation was shown in India. But before these complexities were made necessary, Charlie had spoken to white and black and yellow and Ted men in the universal language of comedy and pathos. He spoke to all mankind with the least gesture of his miraculous hands, the lift of an eyebrow, the droop of a shoulder. He spoke with his little cane and his large boots, with the white mask of his Pierrot face, and his eloquent eyes. In his silence, he spoke directly to each and every man, and allowed him to translate into his own tongue, against his own national background, the great basic truths of humankind that he presented to them. Charlie was never more eloquent than when he uttered no word, never funnier than when he suffered in silence the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.