The Man Who Laughs

by Victor Hugo

  The vivisection of former days was not limited to the manufacture of phenomena for the market-place, of buffoons for the palace (a species of augmentative of the courtier), and eunuchs for sultans and popes. It abounded in varieties. One of its triumphs was the manufacture of cocks for the King of England.

  It was the custom, in the palace of the kings of England, to have a sort of watchman, who crowed like a cock. This watcher, awake while all others slept, ranged the palace, and raised from hour to hour the cry of the farmyard, repeating it as often as was necessary, and thus supplying a clock. This man, promoted to be cock, had in childhood undergone the operation of the pharynx, which was part of the art described by Dr. Conquest. Under Charles II, the salivation inseparable to the operation having disgusted the Duchess of Portsmouth, the appointment was indeed preserved, so that the splendour of the crown should not be tarnished; but they got an unmutilated man to represent the cock. A retired officer was generally selected for this honourable employment. Under James II the functionary was named William Sampson, Cock, and received for his crow nine pounds, two shillings and sixpence annually. [1]

  The memoirs of Catherine II inform us that at St. Petersburg, scarcely a hundred years since, whenever the Czar or Czarina was displeased with a Russian prince, he was forced to squat down in the great ante-chamber of the palace, and to remain in that posture a certain number of days, mewing like a cat, or clucking like a sitting hen, and pecking his food from the floor.

  These fashions have passed away; but not so much, perhaps, as one might imagine. Nowadays, courtiers slightly modify their intonation in clucking to please their masters. More than one picks up from the ground--we will not say from the mud--what he eats.

  It is very fortunate that kings can not err. Hence their contradictions never perplex us. In approving always, one is sure to be always right--which is pleasant. Louis XIV would not have liked to see at Versailles either an officer acting the cock, or a prince acting the turkey. That which raised the royal and imperial dignity in England and Russia would have seemed to Louis the Great incompatible with the crown of St. Louis. We know what his displeasure was when Madame Henriette forgot herself so far as to see a hen in a dream--which was, indeed, a grave breach of good manners in a lady of the Court. When one is of the court, one should not dream of the courtyard. Bossuet, it may be remembered, was nearly as scandalised as Louis XIV.

  [1] M. Victor Hugo refers the reader to Chamberlayne's work on The Present State of England, chapter xiii, where will be found "A list of His Majesties Household Officers and Servants attending in the several offices below stairs, under the command of his Grace James Duke of Ormond, Lord Stewart, together with their respective salaries." From this list it may be enough to quote the last five entries.

  "Sir Edward Villers, Knight Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . £26 00 00

  Six under Marshalls . . . . . . . . . . 100 00 00

  William Sampson, Cock . . . . . . . . . . 09 02 06

  Four Grooms Purveyours of Longcarts . . . . . . . . . . 10 13 04

  Henry Rainsford, Porter at St. James's . . . . . . . . . . 50 00 00"

  And in case any one should imagine that Cock is a misprint for Cook, let it be observed that the officers of the king's kitchen are given in a different part of the same chapter, and that the wages of the meanest of them was double what the gallant Cock obtained. Here is the list:

  "John Clement, Esquire, 2nd Clerk . . . . . . . . . . £150 00 00

  Claude Fourmont, Esquire, 1st Master Cook . . . . . . . . . . 150 00 00

  Patrick Lambe, Esquire, 2nd Master Cook . . . . . . . . . . 80 00 00

  Thomas Budding, Yeoman of the Mouth . . . . . . . . . . 50 00 00

  Joseph Centlivre, Yeoman Pottagier . . . . . . . . . . 50 00 00

  John Tompson,/ Groom . . . . . . . . . . 30 00 00

  John Lincicombe, Groom . . . . . . . . . . 30 00 00

  Alexander Housden, Child . . . . . . . . . . 25 00 00

  James Beacher, Child . . . . . . . . . . 25 00 00

  One Scourer . . . . . . . . . . 30 00 00

  Three Turnbroches . . . . . . . . . . 54 15 00

  One Doorkeeper . . . . . . . . . . 18 00 00

  --TRANSLATOR.

  IV

  The commerce in children in the 17th century, as we have explained, was connected with a trade. The Comprachicos engaged in the commerce and carried on the trade. They bought children, worked a little on the raw material, and resold them afterward.

  The venders were of all kinds: from the wretched father, getting rid of his family, to the master, utilising his stud of slaves. The sale of men was a simple matter. In our own time we have had fighting to maintain this right. Remember that it is less than a century ago since the Elector of Hesse sold his subjects to the King of England, who required men to be killed in America. Kings went to the Elector of Hesse as we go to the butcher to buy meat. The Elector had food for powder in stock, and hung up his subjects in his shop. Come buy, it is for sale. In England, under Jeffreys, after the tragical episode of Monmouth, there were many lords and gentlemen beheaded and quartered. Those who were executed left wives and daughters, widows and orphans, whom James II gave to the queen, his wife. The queen sold these ladies to William Penn. Very likely the king had so much per cent on the transaction. The extraordinary thing is not that James II should have sold women, but that William Penn should have bought them. The Penn purchase is excused, or explained, by the fact that, having a desert to sow with men, he needed women as farming implements.

  Her Gracious Majesty made a good business out of these ladies. The young sold dear. We may imagine, with the uneasy feeling which a complicated scandal arouses, that probably some old duchesses were thrown in cheap.

  The Comprachicos were also called the Cheylas, a Hindoo word, which conveys the image of harrying a nest.

  For a long time the Comprachicos only partially concealed themselves. There is sometimes in the social order a favouring shadow thrown over iniquitous trades, in which they thrive. In our own day we have seen an association of the kind in Spain, under the direction of the ruffian Ramon Selles, last from 1834 to 1866, and hold three provinces under terror for thirty years--Valencia, Alicante, and Murcia.

  Under the Stuarts, the Comprachicos were by no means in bad odour at court. On occasions they were used for reasons of state. For James II they were almost an instrumentum regni. It was a time when families which were refractory or in the way were dismembered; when a descent was cut short; when heirs were suddenly suppressed. At times one branch was defrauded to the profit of another. The Comprachicos had a genius for disfiguration which recommended them to state policy. To disfigure is better than to kill. There was, indeed, the Iron Mask, but that was a mighty measure. Europe could not be peopled with iron masks, while deformed tumblers ran about the streets without creating any surprise. Besides, the iron mask is removable; not so the mask of flesh. You are masked forever by your own flesh--what can be more ingenious? The Comprachicos worked on man as the Chinese work on trees. They had their secrets, as we have said; they had tricks which are now lost arts. A sort of fantastic stunted thing left their hands; it was ridiculous and wonderful. They would touch up a little being with such skill that its father could not have known it. Et que méconnaîtrait l'æil même de son père, as Racine says in bad French. Sometimes they left the spine straight and remade the face. They unmarked a child as one might unmark a pocket-handkerchief.

  Products, destined for tumblers, had their joints dislocated in a masterly manner--you would have said they had been boned. Thus gymnasts were made.

  Not only did the Comprachicos take away his face from the child, they also took away his memory. At least they took away all they could of it; the child had no consciousness of the mutilation to which he had been subjected. This frightful surgery left its traces on his countenance, but not on his mind. The most he could recall was that one day he had been seized by men, that next he had fallen asleep, and then that he had been cur
ed. Cured of what? he did not know. Of burnings by sulphur and incisions by the iron he remembered nothing. The Comprachicos deadened the little patient by means of a stupefying powder which was thought to be magical, and suppressed all pain. This powder has been known from time immemorial in China, and is still employed there in the present day. The Chinese have been beforehand with us in all our inventions--printing, artillery, aerostation, chloroform. Only the discovery which in Europe at once tales life and birth, and becomes a prodigy and a wonder, remains a chrysalis in China, and is preserved in a death-like state. China is a museum of embryos.

  Since we are in China, let us remain there a moment to note a peculiarity. In China, from time immemorial, they have possessed a certain refinement of industry and art. It is the art of molding a living man. They take a child two or three years old, put him in a porcelain vase, more or less grotesque, which is made without top or bottom, to allow egress for the head and feet. During the day the vase is set upright, and at night is laid down to allow the child to sleep. Thus the child thickens without growing taller, filling up with his compressed flesh and distorted bones the reliefs in the vase. This development in a bottle continues many years. After a certain time it becomes irreparable. When they consider that this is accomplished, and the monster made, they break the vase. The child comes out--and, behold, there is a man in the shape of a mug!

  This is convenient; by ordering your dwarf betimes you are able to have it of any shape you wish.

  V

  James II tolerated the Comprachicos for the good reason that he made use of them; at least it happened that he did so more than once. We do not always disdain to use what we despise. This low trade, an excellent expedient sometimes for the higher one which is called state policy, was willingly left in a miserable state, but was not persecuted. There was no surveillance, but a certain amount of attention. Thus much might be useful--the law closed one eye, the king opened the other.

  Sometimes the king went so far as to avow his complicity. These are audacities of monarchical terrorism. The disfigured one was marked with the fleur-de-lis; they took from him the mark of God, they put on him the mark of the king. Jacob Astley, knight and baronet, lord of Melton Constable, in the county of Norfolk, had in his family a child who had been sold, and upon whose forehead the dealer had imprinted a fleur-de-lis with a hot iron. In certain cases, in which it was held desirable to register for some reason the royal origin of the new position made for the child, they used such means. England has always done us the honour to utilise, for her personal service, the fleur-de-lis.

  The Comprachicos, allowing for the shade which divides a trade from a fanaticism, were analogous to the Stranglers of India. They lived among themselves in gangs, and to facilitate their progress, affected somewhat of the Merry-Andrew. They encamped here and there, but they were grave and religious, bearing no affinity to other nomads, and incapable of theft. The people for a long time wrongly confounded them with the Moors of Spain and the Moors of China. The Moors of Spain were coiners, the Moors of China were thieves. There was nothing of the sort about the Comprachicos; they were honest folk. Whatever you may think of them, they were sometimes sincerely scrupulous. They pushed open a door, entered, bargained for a child, paid, and departed. All was done with propriety.

  They were of all countries. Under the name of Comprachicos fraternised English, French, Castilians, Germans, Italians. A unity of idea, a unity of superstition, the pursuit of the same calling, matte such fusions. In this fraternity of vagabonds, those of the Mediterranean seaboard represented the East, those of the Atlantic seaboard the West. Many Basques conversed with many Irishmen. The Basque and the Irishman understand each other, they speak the old Punic jargon; add to this the intimate relations of Catholic Ireland with Catholic Spain--relations such that they terminated by bringing to the gallows in London one almost King of Ireland, the Celtic Lord de Brany; from which resulted the conquest of the county of Leitrim.

  The Comprachicos were rather a fellowship than a tribe rather a residuum than a fellowship. It was all the riff-raff of the universe, having for their trade a crime. It was a sort of harlequin people, all composed of rags. To recruit a man was to sew on a tatter.

  To wander was the Comprachicos' law of existence--to appear and disappear. What is barely tolerated can not take root. Even in the kingdoms where their business supplied the courts, and, on occasions, served as an auxiliary to the royal power, they were now and then suddenly ill-treated. Kings made use of their art, and sent the artists to the galleys. These inconsistencies belong to the ebb and flow of royal caprice. "For such is our pleasure."

  A rolling stone and a roving trade gather no moss. The Comprachicos were poor. They might have said what the lean and ragged witch observed, when she saw them setting fire to the stake, "Lejell n'en vaut pas la chandelle." It is possible, nay probable (their chiefs remaining unknown), that the wholesale contractors in the trade were rich. After the lapse of two centuries, it would be difficult to throw any light on this point. It was, as we have said, a fellowship. It had its laws, its oaths, its Formulæ--it had almost its cabala. Any one nowadays wishing to know all about the Comprachicos need only go into Biscaya or Galicia; there were many Basques among them; and it is in those mountains that one hears their history. To this day the Comprachicos are spoken of at Oyarzun, at Urbistondo, at Leso, at Astigarraga. Aguardate niño, que voy llamar al Comprachicos--Take care, child, or I'll call the Comprachicos--is the cry with which mothers frighten their children in that country. The Comprachicos, like the Zigeuner and the Gypsies, had appointed places for periodical meetings. From tinge to time their leaders conferred together. In the seventeenth century they had four principal points of rendezvous. One in Spain, the pass of Pancorbo; one in Germany, the glade called the Wicked Woman, near Diekirsch, where there are two enigmatic bas-reliefs, representing a woman with a head and a man without one; one in France, the hill where was the colossal statue of Massue-la-Promesse in the old sacred wood of Borvo Tomona, near Bourbonne les Bains; one in England, behind the garden wall of William Challoner, Squire of Gisborough in Cleveland, Yorkshire, behind the square tower and the great wing which is entered by an arched door.

  VI

  The laws against vagabonds have always been very rigorous in England. England, in her Gothic legislation, seemed to be inspired with this principle, Homo errans fera errante pejor. One of the special statutes classifies the man without a home as "more dangerous than the asp, dragon, lynx, or basilisk" (atrocior aspide, dracone, lynce, et basilico) . For a long time England troubled herself as much concerning the gypsies, of whom she wished to be rid, as about the wolves of which she had been cleared. In that the Englishman differed from the Irishman, who prayed to the saints for the health of the wolf, and called him my godfather.

  English law, nevertheless, in the same way as (we have just seen) it tolerated the wolf, tamed, domesticated, and become in some sort a dog, tolerated the regular vagabond, become In some sort a subject. It did not trouble itself about either the mountebank or the traveling barber, or the quack doctor, or the pedler, or the open-air scholar, as long as they had a trade to live by. Further than this and with these exceptions, the description of freedom which exists in the wanderer terrified the law. A tramp was a possible public enemy. That modern thing, the lounger, was then unknown; that ancient thing, the vagrant, was alone understood. A suspicious appearance, that indescribable something which all understand and none can define, was sufficient reason that society should take a man by the collar. "Where do you live? How do you get your living?" And if he could not answer, harsh penalties awaited him. Iron and fire were in the noble: the law practiced the cauterisation of vagrancy.

  Hence, throughout English territory, a veritable loi des suspects was applicable to vagrants (who, it must be owned, readily became malefactors), and particularly to gypsies whose expulsion has erroneously been compared to the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from Spain, and the Protestants from France. As
for us, we do not confound a battue with a persecution.

  The Comprachicos, we insist, had nothing in common with the gypsies. The gypsies were a nation; the Comprachicos were a compound of all nations--the lees of a horrible vessel full of filthy waters. The Comprachicos had not, like the gypsies, an idiom of their own; their jargon was a promiscuous collection of idioms: all languages were mixed together in their language; they spoke a medley. Like the gypsies, they had come to be a people winding through the peoples; but their common tie was association, not race. At all epochs in history one finds in the vast liquid mass which constitutes humanity some of these streams of venomous men exuding poison around them. The gypsies were a tribe; the Comprachicos a freemasonry--a masonry having not a noble aim, but a hideous handicraft. Finally, their religions differ--the gypsies were Pagans, the Comprachicos were Christians, and, more than that, good Christians, as became an association which, although a mixture of all nations, owed its birth to Spain, a devout land.

  They were more than Christians, they were Catholics; they were more than Catholics, they were Romans, and so touchy in their faith, and so pure, that they refused to associate with the Hungarian nomads of the comitate of Pesth, commanded and led by an old man, having for sceptre a wand with a silver ball, surmounted by the double-headed Austrian eagle. It is true that these Hugarians were schismatics to the extent of celebrating the Assumption on the 29th August, which is an abomination.