Following the health-care debacle, she abandoned any ambition of securing the sort of radical change she once embraced. Since then, it has been all politics — all calculation. And she is not a very good politician or calculator, as Barack Obama could tell you with a self-satisfied smirk.

The story is as old as Faust. But what did Hillary Rodham Clinton get out of her infernal bargain? There is money, to be sure, the Clintons having grown vastly wealthy, but she does not give the impression of a person who is in it for the money — she seems like the sort of person who could live quite contentedly on a fraction of what she might make as an academic and an ornament to corporate boards. Bill Clinton was in it for the adoration and affirmation (and does not seem to despise money), but Mrs. Clinton cannot hide the wry cynicism with which she regards the public — she lacks her husband’s psychopathic gift for being simultaneously sentimental and predatory.

Chemical addiction is not the only sort of addiction, or even the worst sort. The addict’s panicked manic drive to achieve an ever-higher level of stimulation, as though there were some blissful nirvana at the end of the continuum, animates the work of the Marquis de Sade — another monster for our times, two intervening centuries be damned — who imagined a man so addicted to performing the wildest of moral outrages that he arranges a tableau that will allow him to commit incest, murder, rape, adultery, and sacrilege all at once. (It gets complicated.) For the worst addicts — opiates, alcohol, gambling — life ultimately is reduced to the point that nothing remains other than the service of the addiction, and the cruel truth sets in not only that there is no ultimate satisfaction waiting to be had on the other side of a higher dose or a more refined hit, but that the stimulant itself in the end loses its ability to satisfy. The addict’s Faustian contract, like all such bargains, turns out to have been constructed with deceit.