The Man Who Laughs

by Victor Hugo

  Gwynplaine, as well as Ursus, contemplated her.

  The Green Box somewhat resembled a phantasmagoria in its representations. Chaos Vanquished was rather a dream than a piece; it generally produced on the audience the effect of a vision. Now, this effect was reflected on the actors. The house took the performers by surprise, and they were thunderstruck in their turn. It was a rebound of fascination.

  The woman watched them, and they watched her.

  At the distance at which they were placed, and in that luminous mist which is the half-light of a theatre, details were lost, and it was like a hallucination. Of course it was a woman, but was it not a chimera as well? The penetration of her light into their obscurity stupefied them. It was like the appearance of an unknown planet. It came from a world of the happy. Her irradiation amplified her figure. The lady was covered with nocturnal glitterings, like a milky way. Her precious stones were stars. The diamond brooch was perhaps a pleiad. The splendid beauty of her bosom seemed supernatural. They felt, as they looked upon the star-like creature, the momentary but thrilling approach of the regions of felicity. It was out of the heights of a Paradise that she leaned toward their mean-looking Green Box, and revealed to the gaze of its wretched audience her expression of inexorable serenity. As she satisfied her unbounded curiosity, she fed at the same time the curiosity of the public. It was the Zenith permitting the Abyss to look at it.

  Ursus, Gwynplaine, Vinos, Fibi, the crowd, every one had succumbed to her dazzling beauty, except Dea, ignorant in her darkness.

  An apparition was indeed before them; but none of the ideas usually evoked by the word were realised in the lady's appearance. There was nothing about her diaphanous, nothing undecided, nothing floating, no mist. She was an apparition; rose-coloured and fresh, and full of health. Yet, under the optical condition in which Ursus and Gwynplaine were placed, she looked like a vision. There are fleshy phantoms, called vampires. Such a queen as she, though a spirit to the crowd, consumes twelve hundred thousand a year, to keep her health.

  Behind the lady, in the shadow, her page was to be perceived, el mozo, a little child-like man, fair and pretty, with a serious face. A very young and very grave servant was the fashion at that period. This page was dressed from top to toe, in scarlet velvet, and had on his skull-cap, which was embroidered with gold, a bunch of curled feathers. This was the sign of a high class of service, and indicated attendance on a very great lady.

  The lackey is part of the lord, and it was impossible not to remark, in the shadow of his mistress, the train-bearing page. 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.

  Notwithstanding the presence of her train-bearer, the lady was not the less alone in the compartment, since a valet counts for nothing.

  However powerful a diversion had been produced by this person, who produced the effect of a personage, the denouement of Chaos Vanquished was more powerful still. The impression which it made was, as usual, irresistible. Perhaps, even, there occurred in the hall, on account of the radiant spectator (for sometimes the spectator is part of the spectacle), an increase of electricity. The contagion of Gwynplaine's laugh was more triumphant than ever. The whole audience fell into an indescribable epilepsy of hilarity, through which could be distinguished the sonorous and magisterial ha! ha! of Tom-Jim-Jack.

  Only the unknown lady looked at the performance with the immobility of a statue, and with her eyes, like those of a phantom, she laughed not.

  A spectre, but sun-born.

  The performance over, the platform drawn up, and the family reassembled in the Green Box, Ursus opened and emptied on the supper-table the bag of receipts.

  From a heap of pennies, there slid suddenly forth a Spanish gold onza.

  "Hers!" cried Ursus. The onza amid the pence covered with verdigris was a type of the lady amid the crowd.

  "She has paid an onza for her seat," cried Ursus, with enthusiasm.

  Just then the hotel-keeper entered the Green Box, and, passing his arm out of the window at the back of it, opened the loophole in the wall of which we have already spoken, which gave a view over the field, and which was level with the window, then he made a silent sign to Ursus to look out. A carriage, swarming with plumed footmen carrying torches and magnificently appointed, was driving off at a fast trot.

  Ursus took the piece of gold between his forefinger and thumb respectfully, and, showing it to Master Nicless, said:

  "She is a goddess."

  Then, his eyes falling on the carriage which was about to turn the corner of the field, and on the imperial of which the footmen's torches lighted up a golden coronet, with eight strawberry leaves, he exclaimed:

  "She is more. She is a duchess."

  The carriage disappeared. The rumbling of its wheels died away in the distance.

  Ursus remained some moments in an ecstasy, holding the gold piece between his finger and thumb, as in a monstrance, elevating iit as the priest elevates the host.

  Then he placed it on the table, and, as he contemplated it, began to talk of "Madame." The innkeeper replied: "She was a duchess." Yes. They knew her title. But her name? Of that they were ignorant. Master Nicless had been close to the carriage, and seen the coat-of-arms and the footmen covered with lace. The coachman had a wig on which might have belonged to a Lord Chancellor. The carriage was of that rare design called, in Spain, cochetumbon, a splendid build, with a top like a tomb, which makes a magnificent support for a coronet. The page was a man In miniature, so small that he could sit on the step of the carriage outside the door. The duty of those pretty creatures was to bear the trains of their mistresses. They also bore their messages. And did you remark the plumed cap of the page? How grand it was! You pay a fine if you wear those plumes without the right of doing so. Master Nicless had seen the lady, too, quite close. A kind of queen. Such wealth gives beauty. The skin is whiter, the eye more proud, the gait more noble, and grace more insolent. Nothing can equal the elegant impertinence of hands which never work. Master Nicless told the story of all the magnificence of the white skin with the blue veins, the neck, the shoulders, the arms, the touch of paint everywhere, the pearl earrings, the head-dress powdered with gold; the profusion of stones, the rubies, the diamonds.

  "Less brilliant than her eyes," murmured Ursus.

  Gwynplaine said nothing.

  Dea listened.

  "And do you know," said the tavern-keeper, "the most wonderful thing of all?"

  "What?" said Ursus.

  "I saw her get into her carriage."

  "What then?"

  "She did not get in alone."

  "Nonsense!"

  "Some one got in with her."

  "Who?"

  "Guess."

  "The king," said Ursus.

  "In the first place," said Master Nicless, "there is no king at present. We are not living under a king. Guess who got into the carriage with the duchess."

  "Jupiter," said Ursus.

  The hotel-keeper replied: "Tom-Jim-Jack!"

  Gwynplaine, who had not said a word, broke silence.

  "Tom-Jim-Jack!" he cried.

  There was a pause of astonishment, during which the low voice of Dea was heard to say:

  "Can not this woman be prevented coming?"

  * * *

  VIII

  SYMPTOMS OF POISONING

  THE "APPARITION" did not return.

  It did not reappear in the theatre, but it reappeared to the memory of Gwynplaine. Gwynplaine was, to a certain degree, troubled.

  It seemed to him that for the first time in his life he had seen a woman.

  He made that first stumble, a strange dream. We should beware of the nature of the reveries that fasten
on us. Reverie has in it the mystery and subtlety of an odour. It is to thought what perfume is to the tuberose. It is at times the exudation of a venomous idea, and it penetrates like a vapour. You may poison yourself with reveries, as with flowers. An intoxicating suicide, exquisite and malignant.

  The suicide of the soul is evil thought. In it is the poison. Reverie attracts, cajoles, lures, entwines, and then makes you its accomplice. It makes you bear your half in the trickeries which it plays on conscience. It charms; then it corrupts you. We may say of reverie as of play, one begins by being a dupe, and ends by being a cheat.

  Gwynplaine dreamed.

  He had never before seen Woman.

  He had seen the shadow in the women of the populace, and he had seen the soul in Dea.

  He had just seen the reality.

  A warm and living skin. under which one felt the circulation of passionate blood; an outline with the precision of marble and the undulation of the wave; a high and impassive mien, mingling refusal with attraction, and summing itself up in its own glory; hair of the colour of the reflection from a furnace; a gallantry of adornment producing in herself and in others a tremor of voluptuousness, the half-revealed nudity betraying a disdainful desire to be coveted at a distance by the crowd; an irradicable coquetry; the charm of impenetrability, temptation seasoned by the glimpse of perdition, a promise to the senses and a menace to the mind; a double anxiety, the one desire, the other fear. He had just seen these things. He had just seen Woman.

  He had seen more and less than a woman; he had seen a female.

  And at the same time an Olympian. The female of a god.

  The mystery of sex had just been revealed to him.

  And where? On inaccessible heights--at an infinite distance.

  O mocking destiny! The soul, that celestial essence, he possessed; he held it in his hand. It was Dea. Sex, that terrestrial embodiment, he perceived in the heights of heaven. It was that woman.

  A duchess!

  "More than a goddess," Ursus had said.

  What a precipice!

  Even dreams dissolved before such a perpendicular height to escalade.

  Was he going to commit the folly of dreaming about the unknown beauty? He debated with himself.

  He recalled all that Ursus had said of high stations which are almost royal. The philosopher's disquisitions, which had hitherto seemed so useless, now became landmarks for his thoughts. A very thin layer of forgetfulness often lies over our memory, through which at times we catch a glimpse of all beneath it. His fancy ran on that august world, the peerage, to which the lady belonged, and which was so inexorably placed above the inferior world, the common people, of which he was one. And was he even one of the people? Was not he, the mountebank, below the lowest of the low? For the first time since he had arrived at the age of reflection, he felt his heart vaguely contracted by a sense of his baseness, and of that which we nowadays call abasement. The paintings and the catalogues of Ursus, his lyrical inventories, his dithyrambics of castles, parks, fountains, and colonnades, his catalogues of riches and of power, revived in the memory of Gwynplaine in the relief of reality mingled with mist. He was possessed with the image of this zenith. That a man should be a lord!--it seemed chimerical. It was so, however. Incredible thing! There were lords! But were they of flesh and blood, like ourselves? It seemed doubtful. He felt that he lay at the bottom of all darkness, encompassed by a wall, while he could just perceive in the far distance above his head, through the mouth of the pit, a dazzling confusion of azure, of figures, and of rays, which was Olympus. In the midst of this glory the duchess shone out resplendent.

  He felt for this woman a strange, inexpressible longing, combined with a conviction of the impossibility of attainment.

  This poignant contradiction returned to his mind again and again, notwithstanding every effort. He saw near to him, even within his reach, in close and tangible reality, the soul; and in the unattainable--in the depths of the ideal--the flesh.

  None of these thoughts attained to certain shape. They were as a vapour within him, changing every instant its form, and floating away. But the darkness which the vapour caused was intense.

  He did not form even in his dreams any hope of reaching the heights where the duchess dwelt. Luckily for him.

  The vibration of such ladders of fancy, if ever we put our foot upon them, may render our brains dizzy forever. Intending to scale Olympus, we reach Bedlam, any distinct feeling of actual desire would have terrified him. He entertained none of that nature.

  Besides, was he likely ever to see the lady again? Most probably not. To fall in love with a passing light on the horizon. madness can not reach to that pitch. To make loving eyes at a star even is not incomprehensible. It is seen again, it reappears, it is fixed in the sky. But can any one be enamoured of a flash of lightning?

  Dreams flowed and ebbed within him. The majestic and gallant idol at the back of the box had cast a light over his diffused ideas, then faded away. He thought, yet thought not of it; turned to other things--returned to it. It rocked about in his brain--nothing more.

  It broke his sleep for several nights. Sleeplessness is as full of dreams as sleep.

  It is almost impossible to express in their exact limits the abstract evolutions of the brain. The inconvenience of words is that they are more marked in form than ideas. All ideas have indistinct boundary lines, words have not. A certain diffused phase of the soul ever escapes words. Expression has its frontiers, thought has none.

  The depths of our secret souls are so vast that Gwynplaine's dreams scarcely touched Dea. Dea reigned sacred in the centre of his soul; nothing could approach her.

  Still (for such contradictions make up the soul of man ), there was a conflict within him. Was he conscious of it? Scarcely.

  In his heart of hearts he felt a collision of desires. We all have our weak points. Its nature would have been clear to Ursus; but to Gwynplaine it was not.

  Two instincts--one the ideal, the other sexual--were struggling within him. Such contests occur between the angels of light and darkness on the edge of the abyss.

  At length the angel of darkness was overthrown. One day Gwynplaine suddenly thought no more of the unknown woman.

  The struggle between two principles--the duel between his earthly and his heavenly nature--had taken place within his soul, and at such a depth that he had understood it but dimly. One thing was certain, that he had never for one moment ceased to adore Dea.

  He had been attacked by a violent disorder, his blood had been fevered; but it was over. Dea alone remained.

  Gwynplaine would have been much astonished had any one told him that Dea had ever been, even for a moment, in danger; and in a week or two the phantom which had threatened the hearts of both their souls faded away.

  Within Gwynplaine nothing remained but the heart, which was the hearth, and the love, which was its fire.

  Besides. we have just said that "the duchess" did not return.

  Ursus thought it all very natural. "The lady with the gold piece" is a phenomenon. She enters, pays, and vanishes. It would be too much joy were she to return.

  As to Dea, she made no allusion to the woman who had come and passed away. She listened, perhaps, and was sufficiently enlightened by the sighs of Ursus, and now and then by some significant exclamation, such as: "One does not get ounces of gold every day!" She spoke no more of "the woman." This showed deep instinct. The soul takes obscure precautions, in the secrets of which it is not always admitted itself. To keep silence about any one seems to keep them afar off. One fears that questions may call them back. We put silence between us, as if we were shutting a door.

  So the incident fell into oblivion.

  Was it ever anything? Had it ever occurred? Could it be said that a shadow had floated between Gwynplaine and Dea? Dea did not know of it, nor Gwynplaine either. No; nothing had occurred. The duchess herself was blurred in the distant perspective like an illusion. It had been but a momentary dream pas
sing over Gwynplaine, out of which he had awakened. When it fades away, a reverie, like a mist, leaves no trace behind; and when the cloud has passed on, love shines out as brightly in the heart as the sun in the sky.

  * * *

  IX

  ABYSSUS ABYSSUM VOCAT

  ANOTHER FACE disappeared; Tom-Jim-Jack's. Suddenly he ceased to frequent the Tadcaster Inn.

  Persons so situated as to be able to observe other phases of fashionable life in London might have seen that about this time the Weekly Gazette, between two extracts from parish registers, announced the departure of Lord David Dirry-Moir, by order of her Majesty, to take command of his frigate in the white squadron, then cruising off the coast of Holland. Ursus, perceiving that Tom-Jim-Jack did not return, was troubled by his absence. He had not seen Tom-Jim-Jack since the day on which he had driven off in the same carriage with the lady of the gold piece. It was, indeed, an enigma who this Tom-Jim-Jack could be, who carried off duchesses under his arm. What an interesting investigation! What questions to propound! What things to be said. Therefore Ursus said not a word.

  Ursus, who had had experience, knew the smart caused by rash curiosity. Curiosity ought always to be proportioned to the curious. By listening, we risk our ear; by watching, we risk our eye. Prudent people neither hear nor see. Tom-Jim-Jack had got into a princely carriage. The tavern-keeper had seen him. It appeared so extraordinary that the sailor should sit by the lady that it made Ursus circumspect. The caprices of those in high life ought to be sacred to the lower orders. The reptiles called the poor had best squat in their holes when they see anything out of the way. Quiescence is a power. Shut your eyes, if you have not the luck to be blind; stop up your ears, if you have not the good fortune to be deaf; paralyse your tongue, if you have not the perfection of being mute. The great do what they like, the little what they can. Let the unknown pass unnoticed. Do not importune mythology. Do not interrogate appearances. Have a profound respect for idols. Do not let us direct our gossiping toward the lessenings or increasings which take place in superior regions, of the motives of which we are ignorant. Such things are mostly optical delusions to us inferior creatures. Metamorphoses are the business of the gods: the transformations and the contingent disorders of great persons who float above us are clouds impossible to comprehend, and perilous to study. Too much attention irritates the Olympians engaged in their gyrations of amusement or fancy; and a thunderbolt may teach you that the bull you are too curiously examining is Jupiter. Do not lift the folds of the stone-coloured mantles of those terrible powers. Indifference is intelligence. Do not stir and you will be safe. Feign death, and they will not kill you. Therein lies the wisdom of the insect. Ursus practiced it.