The Man Who Laughs

by Victor Hugo

  What she did for Bassompierre the Queen of Sheba had done for Solomon, [1] consequently she was right, Holy Writ having created the precedent. That which is biblical may well be Anglican. Biblical precedent goes so far as to speak of a child who was called Ebnehaquem or Melilechet--that is to say, the Wise Man's son.

  Why object to such manners? Cynicism is at least as good as hypocrisy.

  Nowadays England, whose Loyola is named Wesley, casts down her eyes a little at the remembrance of that past age. She is vexed at the memory, yet proud of it.

  Amid such manners as these, a taste for deformity existed, especially among van omen, and singularly among beautiful women. Where is the use of being beautiful if one does not possess a baboon? Where is the charm of being a queen if one can not bandy words with a dwarf? Mary Stuart had "been kind" to the bandy-legged Rizzio. Maria Theresa, of Spain, had been "somewhat familiar" with a negro. Whence the black abbess. In the alcoves of the great century, a hump was the fashion; witness the Marshal of Luxembourg, and before Luxembourg, Condé, "such a pretty little man!"

  Beauties themselves might be ill-made without detriment; it was admitted. Anne Boleyn had one breast bigger than the other, six fingers to one hand, and a projecting tooth; Lavallière was bandy-legged; which did not hinder Henry VIII from going mad for the one and Louis XIV for the other.

  Morals were equally awry. There was not a woman of high rank who was not teratological. Agnes possessed the principles of Messalina. They were women by day, ghouls by night. They sought the scaffold to kiss the heads of the newly beheaded on their iron stakes. Marguerite de Valois, a predecessor of the prudes, wore, fastened to her belt, the hearts of her lovers in tin boxes, padlocked. Henry IV had hidden himself under her farthingale.

  In the 18th century, the Duchess de Berry, daughter of the Regent, was in herself an abstract, of obscene and royal type, of all these creatures.

  These fine ladies, moreover, knew Latin. From the 16th century this had been accounted a feminine accomplishment. Lady Jane Grey had carried fashion to the point of knowing Hebrew. The Duchess Josiana latinised. Then (another fine thing) she was secretly a Catholic; after the manner of her uncle, Charles II, rather than her father, James II. James II had lost his crown for his Catholicism, and Josiana did not care to risk her peerage. Thus it was that while a Catholic among her intimate friends and the refined of both sexes, she was outwardly a Protestant for the benefit of the riff-raff.

  This is the pleasant view to take of religion. You enjoy all the good things belonging to the official Episcopalian church, and later on you die, like Grotius, in the odour of Catholicity, having the glory of a Mass being said for you by le Père Petau.

  Although plump and healthy, Josiana was, we repeat, a perfect prude.

  At times, her sleepy and voluptuous way of dragging out the end of her phrases was like the creeping of a tiger's paws in the jungle.

  The advantage of prudes is that they disorganise the human race. They deprive it of the honour of their adherence. Beyond all, keep the human species at a distance. This is a point of the greatest importance.

  When one has not got Olympus, one must take the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Juno resolves herself into Araminta. A pretension to divinity not admitted creates affectation. In default of thunderclaps there is impertinence. The temple shrivels into the boudoir. Not having the power to be a goddess, she is an idol.

  There is, besides, in prudery, a certain pedantry which is pleasing to women. The coquette and the pedant are neighbours. Their kinship is visible in the fop. The subtile is derived from the sensual. Gluttony affects delicacy, a grimace of disgust conceals cupidity. And then woman feels her weak point guarded by all that casuist try of gallantry which takes the place of scruples in prudes. It is a line of circumvallation with a ditch. Every prude puts on an air of repugnance. It is a protection. She will consent, but she disdains--for the present.

  Josiana had an uneasy conscience. She felt such a leaning toward immodesty that she was a prude. The recoils of pride in the direction opposed to our vices lead us to those of a contrary nature. It was the excessive effort to be chaste which made her a prude. To be too much on the defensive points to a secret desire for attack; the shy woman is not strait-laced. She shut herself up in the arrogance of the exceptional circumstances of her rank, meditating, perhaps, all the while, some sudden lapse from it.

  It was the dawn of the 18th century. England was a sketch of what France was during the regency. Walpole and Dubois are not unlike. Marlborough was fighting against his former king, James II, to whom it was said he had sold his sister, Miss Churchill. Bolingbroke was in his meridian, and Richelieu in his dawn. Gallantry found its convenience in a certain medley of ranks. Men were equalised by the same vices as they were later on, perhaps, by the same ideas. Degradation of rank, an aristocratic prelude, began what the Revolution was to complete. It was not very far off the time when Jelyotte was seen publicly sitting, in broad daylight, on the bed of the Marquis d'Epinay. It is true (for manners re-echo each other) that in the 16th century Smeton's nightcap had been found under Anne Boleyn's pillow.

  If the word woman signifies 'fault, as I forget what Council decided, never was woman so womanlike as then. Never, covering her frailly by her charms, and her weakness by her omnipotence, has she claimed absolution more imperiously. In making the forbidden the permitted fruit, Eve fell; in making the permitted the forbidden fruit, she triumphs. That is the climax. In the 18th century the wife bolts out her husband. She shuts herself up in Eden with Satan. Adam is left outside.

  [1] Regina saba coram rege crura denudavit.--Schicklardus in Proænio Tarich. Jersici F.65.

  III

  All Josiana's instincts impelled her to yield herself gallantly, rather than to give herself legally. To surrender on the score of gallantry implies learning, recalls Menalcas and Amaryllis, and is almost a literary act. Mademoiselle de Scudéry, putting aside the attraction of ugliness for ugliness' sake, had no other motive for yielding to Pelisson.

  The maiden a sovereign, the wife a subject, such was the old English notion. Josiana was deferring the hour of this subjection as long as she could. She must eventually marry Lord David, since such was the royal pleasure. It was a necessity, doubtless; but what a pity! Josiana appreciated Lord David, and showed him off. There was between them a tacit agreement, neither to conclude nor to break off the engagement. They eluded each other. This method of making love, one step in advance, and two back, is expressed in the dances of the period, the minuet and the gavotte.

  It is unbecoming to be married--fades one's ribbons, and makes one look old. An espousal is a dreary absorption of brilliancy. A woman handed over to you by a notary, how commonplace! The brutality of marriage creates definite situations; suppresses the will; kills choice; has a syntax, like grammar; replaces inspiration by orthography; makes a dictation of love; disperses all Life's mysteries; diminishes the rights both of sovereign and subject; by a turn of the scale destroys the charming equilibrium of the sexes, the one robust in bodily strength, the other all-powerful in feminine weakness: strength on one side, beauty on the other; makes one a master and the other a servant, while without marriage one is a slave, the other a queen.

  To make Love prosaically decent, how gross! to deprive it of all impropriety, how dull!

  Lord David was ripening. Forty; 'tis a marked period. He did not perceive this, and in truth he looked no more than thirty. He considered it more amusing to desire Josiana than to possess her. He possessed others. He had mistresses.

  On the other hand, Josiana had dreams.

  Her dreams were worse.

  The Duchess Josiana had a peculiarity, less rare than it is supposed. One of her eyes was blue and the other black. Her pupils were made for love and hate, for happiness and misery. Night and day were mingled in her look.

  Her ambition was this; to show herself capable of impossibilities. One day she said to Swift:

  "You people fancy that you know what scorn is."<
br />
  "You people" meant the human race.

  She was a skin-deep Papist. Her Catholicism did not exceed the amount necessary for fashion. She would have been a Puseyite in the present day. She wore great dresses of velvet, satin, or moire, some composed of fifteen or sixteen yards of material, with embroideries of gold and silver; and round her waist many knots of pearls, alternating with other precious stones. She was extravagant in gold lace. Sometimes she wore an embroidered cloth jacket like a bachelor. She rode on a man's saddle, notwithstanding the invention of side-saddles, introduced into England in the 14th century by Anne, wife of Richard II. She washed her face, arms, shoulders, and neck in sugar-candy, diluted in white of egg, after the fashion of Castile. There came over her face, after any one had spoken wittily in her presence, a reflective smile of singular grace.

  She was free from malice, and rather good-natured than otherwise.

  * * *

  IV

  THE LEADER OF FASHIONS

  JOSIANA was bored. The fact is so natural as to be scarcely worth mentioning.

  Lord David held the position of judge in the gay life of London. He was looked up to by the nobility and gentry. Let us register a glory of Lord David's. He was daring enough to wear his own hair. The reaction against the wig was beginning. Just as in 1824 Eugene Deveria was the first to allow his beard to grow, so in 1702 Prince Devereux was the first to risk wearing his own hair in public disguised by artful curling. For to risk one's hair was almost to risk one's head. The indignation was universal. Nevertheless Prince Devereux was Viscount Hereford, and a peer of England. He was insulted, and the deed was well worth the insult. In the hottest part of the row Lord David suddenly appeared without his wig and in his own hair. Such conduct shakes the foundations of society. Lord David was insulted even more than Viscount Hereford. He held his ground. Prince Devereux was the first, Lord David Dirry-Moir the second. It is sometimes more difficult to be second than first. It requires less genius, but more courage. The first, intoxicated by the novelty, may ignore the danger; the second sees the abyss, and rushes into it. Lord David flung himself into the abyss of no longer wearing a wig. Later on these lords found imitators. Following these two revolutionists, men found sufficient audacity to wear their own hair, and powder was introduced as an extenuating circumstance.

  In order to establish, before we pass on, an important period of history, we should remark that the first blow in the war of wigs was really struck by a Queen, Christina of Sweden, who wore men's clothes, and had appeared in 1680, in her hair of golden brown, powdered, and brushed up from her head. She had, besides, says Misson, a slight beard.

  The pope, on his part, by a bull of March, 1694, had somewhat let down the wig, by taking it from the heads of the bishops and priests, and in ordering churchmen to let their hair grow.

  Lord David, then, did not wear a wig, and did wear cowhide boots.

  Such great things made him a mark for public admiration. There was not a club of which he was not the leader, not a boxing match in which he was not desired as referee. The referee is the arbitrator.

  He had drawn up the rules of several clubs in high life. He founded several resorts of fashionable society, of which one, the Lady Guinea, was still in existence in Pall Mali in 1772. The Lady Guinea was a club in which all the youth of the peerage congregated. They gamed there. The lowest stake allowed was a rouleaux of fifty guineas, and there was never less than 20,000 guineas on the table. By the side of each player was a little stand, on which to place his cup of tea, and a gilt bowl in which to put the rouleaux of guineas. The players, like servants when cleaning knives, wore leather sleeves to save their lace, breast-plates of leather to protect their ruffles, shades on their brows to shelter their eyes from the great glare of the lamps, and, to keep their curls in order, broad-brimmed hats covered with flowers. They were masked to conceal their excitement, especially when playing the game of quinze. All, moreover, had their coats turned the wrong way, for luck.

  Lord David was a member of the Beefsteak Club, the Surly Club, and of the Splitfarthing Club, of the Cross Club, the Scratchpenny Club, of the Sealed Knot, a Royalist club, and of the Martinus Scribblerus, founded by Swift, to take the place of the Rota, founded by Milton.

  Though handsome, he belonged to the Ugly Club. This club was dedicated to deformity. The members agreed to fight, not about a beautiful woman, but about an ugly man. The hall of the club was adorned by hideous portraits--Thersites, Triboulet, Duns, Hudibras, Scarron; over the chimney was Æsop, between two men, each blind of an eye, Cocles and Camoëns (Cocles being blind of the left, Camoëns of the right eye), so arranged that the two profiles without eyes were turned to each other. The day that the beautiful Mrs. Visart caught the smallpox, the Ugly Club toasted her. This club was still in existence in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Mirabeau was elected an honorary member.

  Since the restoration of Charles II, revolutionary clubs had been abolished. The tavern in the little street by Moorfields where the Calf's Head Club was held, had been pulled down; it was so called because on the 30th of January, the day on which the blood of Charles I flowed on the scaffold, the members had drunk red wine out of the skull of a calf to the health of Cromwell.

  There was the Hell-fire Club, where they played at being impious. It was a joust of sacrilege. Hell auction there to the highest bidder in blasphemy.

  There was the Butting Club, so called from its members butting folks with their heads. They found some street porter with a wide chest and a stupid countenance. They offered him, and compelled him, if necessary, to accept a pot of porter, in return for which he was to allow them to butt him with their heads four times in the chest, and on this they betted. One day a man, a great brute of a Welshman named Gogangerdd, expired at the third butt. This looked serious. An inquest was held, and the jury returned the following verdict:--"Died of an inflation of the heart, caused by excessive drinking." Gogangerdd had certainly drunk the contents of the pot of porter.

  There was the Fun Club. Fun is like cant, like humour, a word which is untranslatable. Fun is to farce what pepper is to salt. To get into a house and break a valuable mirror, slash the family portraits, poison the dog, put the cat in the aviary, is called "cutting a bit of fun." To give bad news which is untrue, whereby people put on mourning by mistake, is fun. It was fun to cut a square hole in the Holbein at Hampton Court. Fun would have been proud to have broken the arm of the Venus of Milo. Under James II a young millionaire lord who had during the night set fire to a thatched cottage, a feat which made all London burst with laughter, was proclaimed the King of Fun. The poor devils in the cottage were saved in their night clothes. The members of the Fun Club, all of the highest aristocracy, used to run about London during the hours when the citizens were asleep, pulling the hinges from the shutters, cutting off the pipes of pumps, filling up cisterns, digging up cultivated plots of ground, putting out lamps, sawing through the beams which supported houses, breaking the window panes, especially in the poor quarters of the town. It was the rich who acted thus toward the poor. For this reason no complaint was possible. That was the best of the joke. These manners have not altogether disappeared. In many places in England and in English possessions--at Guernsey, for instance--your house is now and then somewhat damaged during the night, or a fence is broken, or a knocker twisted off your door. If it were poor people who did these things, they would be sent to jail; but they are done by pleasant young gentlemen.

  The most fashionable of the clubs was presided over by an emperor, who wore a crescent on his forehead, and was called the Grand Mohawk. The Mohawk surpassed the Fun. Do evil for evil's sake was the programme. The Mohawk Club had one great object--to injure. To fulfil this duty, all means were held good. In becoming a Mohawk, the members took an oath to be hurtful. To injure at any price, no matter when, no matter whom, no matter where, was a matter of duty. Every member of the Mohawk Club was bound to possess an accomplishment. One was "a dancing master"; that is to sa
y he made the rustics frisk about by pricking the calves of their legs with the point of his sword. Others knew how to make a man sweat; that is to say, a circle of gentlemen with drawn rapiers would surround a poor wretch, so that it was impossible for him not to turn his back upon some one. The gentleman behind him chastised him for this by a prick of his sword, which made him spring round; another prick in the back warned the fellow that one of noble blood was behind him, and so on, each one wounding him in his turn. When the man, closed round by the circle of swords and covered with blood, had turned and danced about enough, they ordered their servants to beat him with sticks, to change the course of his ideas. Others "hit the lion"; that is, they gayly stopped a passenger, broke his nose with a blow of the fist, and then shoved both thumbs into his eyes. If his eyes were gouged out, he was paid for them.

  Such were, toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, the pastimes of the rich idlers of London. The idlers of Paris had theirs. M. de Charolais was firing his gun at a citizen standing on his own threshold. In all times youth has had its amusements.

  Lord David Dirry-Moir brought into all these institutions his magnificent and liberal spirit. Just like any one else, he would gayly set fire to a cot of woodwork and thatch, and just scorch those within; but he would rebuild their houses in stone. He insulted two ladies. One was unmarried: he gave her a portion; the other was married: he had her husband appointed chaplain.