“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.

This line comes at the close of Thomas Hardy’s novel *Tess of the d’Urbervilles* (1891), immediately after Tess has been captured and executed for killing Alec d’Urberville. Hardy frames the ending with an overtly classical, tragic register: the “President of the Immortals” alludes to the gods of Greek drama (Hardy signals Aeschylus in particular), who in tragedy can appear to treat human lives as playthings. The quotation’s ironic scare quotes around “Justice” underscore Hardy’s skepticism toward the moral and legal systems that condemn Tess, a poor rural woman, while the social forces that ruin her remain largely unpunished.

Hardy’s sentence is a bitter, tragic summation: what society calls “justice” is exposed as something closer to cruelty or fate. By invoking an Aeschylean “President of the Immortals,” Hardy suggests that Tess’s suffering has been orchestrated or permitted by powers beyond her control—whether divine, cosmic, or the impersonal machinery of class, gender, and law. The phrase “ended his sport” implies that Tess’s life has been treated as entertainment or experiment, intensifying the novel’s critique of moral hypocrisy. The line’s grandeur and irony make it a final indictment of a world where innocence and goodness do not guarantee mercy.