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Updated: June 9, 2025
Dea repeated "Gwynplaine;" and with her head bowed against Gwynplaine's cheek, she whispered faintly, "You have come down to me again. I thank you, Gwynplaine." And seated on his knee, she lifted up her head. Wrapt in his embrace, she turned her sweet face towards him, and fixed on him those eyes so full of light and shadow, as though she could see him. "It is you," she said.
Beneath it was hanging Homo's chain. Does it not seem that the law and the will of nature would have dictated Gwynplaine's headlong rush to throw himself upon life, happiness, love regained? So they would, except in some case of deep terror such as his.
In Gwynplaine's brain was the giddy whirlwind of a crowd of new circumstances; all the light and shade of a metamorphosis; inexpressibly strange confrontations; the shock of the past against the future.
Spleen at the one; Gwynplaine at the other. Thus he rose rapidly in the fair ground and at the cross roads to the very satisfactory renown of a horrible man. It was Gwynplaine's laugh which created the laughter of others, yet he did not laugh himself. His face laughed; his thoughts did not. The extraordinary face which chance or a special and weird industry had fashioned for him, laughed alone.
Memory often takes notes unconsciously; and, without Gwynplaine's suspecting it, the round cheeks, the serious mien, the embroidered and plumed cap of the lady's page left some trace on his mind. The page, however, did nothing to call attention to himself. To do so is to be wanting in respect. He held himself aloof and passive at the back of the box, retiring as far as the closed door permitted.
Ursus had cultivated in him feats of dexterity, and had encrusted him as much as possible with all he himself possessed of science and wisdom. Ursus, contemplating the perplexing mask of Gwynplaine's face, often growled, "He has begun well." It was for this reason that he had perfected him with every ornament of philosophy and wisdom. He repeated constantly to Gwynplaine, "Be a philosopher.
This exertion Gwynplaine scarcely ever made. It was a terrible effort, and an insupportable tension. Moreover, it happened that on the slightest distraction, or the slightest emotion, the laugh, driven back for a moment, returned like a tide with an impulse which was irresistible in proportion to the force of the adverse emotion. With this exception, Gwynplaine's laugh was everlasting.
The curiosity of one place exhausted, they passed on to another. Rolling does not enrich a stone but it enriches a caravan; and year by year, from city to city, with the increased growth of Gwynplaine's person and of his ugliness, the fortune predicted by Ursus had come. "What a good turn they did you there, my boy!" said Ursus.
As I looked at the terrible mutilation, I could but recall the hideous fascination that overcame Josiane, the heroine of Hugo's great novel, "The Man Who Laughs," when she first caught sight of Gwynplaine's mouth slit from ear to ear by the Comprachicos. The outrage on the Warden was not so grotesque, but the effect was the same. I moved along the corridor and stood before the beasts.
Where duty is clear, to put oneself questions is to suffer defeat. There are invasions which the mind may have to suffer. There are the Vandals of the soul evil thoughts coming to devastate our virtue. A thousand contrary ideas rushed into Gwynplaine's brain, now following each other singly, now crowding together.
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