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Updated: June 6, 2025
They had bought the right of translating one of Victor Hugo's modern novels, L'Homme Qui Rit; they bad fixed a date, relying on positive pledges from the French publishers; and now the great French author had postponed his work from week to week and from month to month, and it had so come to pass that the Frenchman's grinning hero would have to appear exactly at the same time as my clergyman.
In the long winter evenings of Toronto Mr. Goldwin Smith has had, probably, abundant experience of it. What is its enemy? The instinct of self-preservation in humanity. Men make crude types and try to impose them, but to no purpose. "L'homme s'agite, Dieu le mene," says Bossuet. "There are many devices in a man's heart; nevertheless the counsel of the Eternal, that shall stand."
The man grinned, showing two magnificent rows of strong white teeth. "I belong to Detroit?" he replied. "Nevaire! I belong to no place. I am ze Frenchman; le Canadien; voyageur, coureur du bois, l'homme of ze wind ovair ze mountains an' ze plain. I am Pierre Louis Lajeunais, who was born at Trois Rivières in ze Province of Quebec, which is a long way from here."
How like her that letter is; egotistical, vain, foolish; no, not foolish narrow, limited, but not foolish; worldly, oh, how worldly! and yet not repulsively so, for there always was in her a certain intensity of feeling that saved her from the commonplace, and gave her an inexpressible charm. Yes, she is a woman who can feel, and she has lived her life and felt it very acutely, very sincerely sincerely?... like a moth caught in a gauze curtain! Well, would that preclude sincerity? Sincerity seems to convey an idea of depth, and she was not very deep, that is quite certain. I never could understand her; a little brain that span rapidly and hummed a pretty humming tune. But no, there was something more in her than that. She often said things that I thought clever, things that I did not forget, things, that I should like to put into books. But it was not brain power; it was only intensity of feeling nervous feeling. I don't know ... perhaps.... She has lived her life ... yes, within certain limits she has lived her life. None of us do more than that. True. I remember the first time I saw her. Sharp, little, and merry a changeable little sprite. I thought she had ugly hands; so she has, and yet I forgot all about her hands before I had known her a month. It is now seven years ago. How time passes! I was very young then. What battles we have had, what quarrels! Still we had good times together. She never lost sight of me, but no intrusion; far too clever for that. I never got the better of her but once ... once I did, enfin! She soon made up for lost ground. I wonder what the charm was. I did not think her pretty, I did not think her clever; that I know.... I never knew if she cared for me, never. There were moments when.... Curious, febrile, subtle little creature, oh, infinitely subtle, subtle in everything, in her sensations subtle; I suppose that was her charm, subtleness. I never knew if she cared for me, I never knew if she hated her husband, one never knew her, I never knew how she would receive me. The last time I saw her ... that stupid American would take her downstairs, no getting rid of him, and I was hiding behind one of the pillars in the Rue de Rivoli, my hand on the cab door. However, she could not blame me that time and all the stories she used to invent of my indiscretions; I believe she used to get them up for the sake of the excitement. She was awfully silly in some ways, once you got her into a certain line; that marriage, that title, and she used to think of it night and day. I shall never forget when she went into mourning for the Count de Chambord. And her tastes, oh, how bourgeois they were! That salon; the flagrantly modern clock, brass work, eight hundred francs on the Boulevard St. Germain, the cabinets, brass work, the rich brown carpet, and the furniture set all round the room geometrically, the great gilt mirror, the ancestral portrait, the arms and crest everywhere, and the stuffy bourgeois sense of comfort; a little grotesque no doubt; the mechanical admiration for all that is about her, for the general atmosphere, the Figaro, that is to say Albert Wolf, l'homme le plus spirituel de Paris, c'est-
"And you are a benefactor of the race," said I. He shrugged his shoulders. "Well, perhaps, after all, it is of some little use," he remarked. "'L'homme c'est rien l'oeuvre c'est tout, as Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand."
There is here a yet greater over-employment of conventional dialogue than in "L'Homme qui Rit"; and much that should have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his characters.
These are all familiar cases. Less so, and probably far more extensive, were the operations of those mediaeval practitioners who made dwarfs and beggar-cripples, show-monsters, some vestiges of whose art still remain in the preliminary manipulation of the young mountebank or contortionist. Victor Hugo gives an account of them in 'L'Homme qui Rit. But perhaps my meaning grows plain now.
The pseudo-Michael Scot among the Signa mulieris calidæ naturæ et quæ coit libenter stated that her hair, both on the head and body, is thick and coarse and crisp, and Della Porta, the greatest of the physiognomists, said that thickness of hair in women meant wantonness. Venette, in his Generation de l'Homme, remarked that men who have much hair on the body are most amorous.
He plunged back into the gloom as though he made a hole in it, with the rigid rapidity of a projectile; the alley of l'Homme Arme became silent and solitary once more; in a twinkling, that strange child, who had about him something of the shadow and of the dream, had buried himself in the mists of the rows of black houses, and was lost there, like smoke in the dark; and one might have thought that he had dissipated and vanished, had there not taken place, a few minutes after his disappearance, a startling shiver of glass, and had not the magnificent crash of a lantern rattling down on the pavement once more abruptly awakened the indignant bourgeois.
M. About, uses the same general idea in the fantastic plot of his "L'Homme a l'Oreille Cassee," and the risk of breakage was insisted on by M. About as well as by the inventive Australian reporter. Mr. Clarke Russell has also frozen a Pirate. Thus the idea of suspended animation is "in the air," is floating among the visions of men of genius.
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