The Man Who Laughs

by Victor Hugo

  The tavern-keeper, who was puzzled as well, questioned Ursus one day.

  "Do you observe that Tom-Jim-Jack never comes here now?"

  "Indeed!" said Ursus. "I have not remarked it."

  Master Nicless made an observation in an undertone, no doubt touching the intimacy between the ducal carriage and Tom-Jim-Jack; a remark which, as it might have been irreverent and dangerous, Ursus took care not to hear.

  Still Ursus was too much of an artist not to regret Tom-Jim-Jack. He felt some disappointment. He told his feeling to Homo, of whose discretion alone he felt certain. He whispered into the ear of the wolf, "Since Tom-Jim-Jack ceased to come, I feel a blank as a man, and a chill as a poet."

  This pouring out of his heart to a friend relieved Ursus.

  His lips were sealed before Gwynplaine, who, however, made no allusion to Tom-Jim-Jack. The fact was that Tom-Jim-Jack's presence or absence mattered not to Gwynplaine, absorbed as he was in Dea.

  Forgetfulness fell more and more on Gwynplaine. As for Dea, she had not even suspected the existence of a vague trouble. At the same time, no more cabals or complaints against the Laughing Man were spoken of. Hate seemed to have let go its hold. All was tranquil in and around the Green Box. No more opposition from strollers, merry-andrews, or priests; no more grumbling outside. Their success was unclouded. Destiny allows of such sudden serenity. The brilliant happiness of Gwynplaine and Dea was for the present absolutely cloudless. Little by little it had risen to a degree which admitted of no increase. There is one word which expresses the situation: apogee. Happiness, like the sea, has its high tide. The worst thing for the perfectly happy is that it recedes.

  There are two ways of being inaccessible: being too high and being too low. At least as much, perhaps, as the first, is the second to be desired. More surely than the eagle escapes the arrow, the animalcule escapes being crushed. This security of insignificance, if it had ever existed on earth, was enjoyed by Gwynplaine and Dea, and never before had it been so complete. They lived on, daily more and more ecstatically wrapt in each other. The heart saturates itself with love as with a divine salt that preserves it, and from this arises the incorruptible constancy of those who have loved each other from the dawn of their lives, and the affection which keeps its freshness in old age. There is such a thing as the embalmment of the heart. It is of Daphnis and Chloë that Philemon and Baucis are made. The old age, of which we speak, evening resembling morning, was evidently reserved for Gwynplaine and Dea. In the meantime they were young.

  Ursus looked on this love as a doctor examines his case. He had what was in those days termed a Hippocratical expression of face. He fixed his sagacious eyes on Dea, fragile and pale, and growled out:

  "It is lucky that she is happy."

  At other times he said:

  "She is lucky for her health's sake."

  He shook his head, and at times read attentively a portion treating of heart-disease in Aviccunas, translated by Vossiscus Fortunatus, Louvain, 1650, an old worm-eaten book of his.

  Dea, when fatigued, suffered from perspirations and drowsiness, and took a daily siesta, as we have already seen. One day, while she was lying asleep on the bearskin, Gwynplaine was out, and Ursus bent down softly and applied his ear to Dea's heart. He seemed to listen for a few minutes, and then stood up, murmuring, "She must not have any shock. It would find out the weak place."

  The crowd continued to flock to the performance of Chaos Vanquished. The success of the Laughing Man seemed inexhaustible. Every one rushed to see him; no longer from Southwark only, but even from other parts of London. The general public began to mingle with the usual audience, which no longer consisted of sailors and drivers only, in the opinion of Master Nicless, who was well acquainted with crowds, there were in the crowd gentlemen and baronets disguised as common people. Disguise is one of the pleasures of pride, and was much in fashion at that period. This mixing of the aristocratic element with the mob was a good sign, and showed that their popularity was extending to London. The fame of Gwynplaine had decidedly penetrated into the great world. Such was the fact. Nothing was talked of but the Laughing Man. He was talked about even at the Mohawk Club, frequented by noblemen.

  In the Green Box they had no idea of all this. They were content to be happy. It was intoxication to Dea to feel, as she did every evening, the crisp and tawny head of Gwynplaine. In love there is nothing like habit. The whole of life is concentrated in it. The reappearance of the stars is the custom of the universe. Creation is nothing but a mistress, and the sun is a lover.

  Light is a dazzling caryatid supporting the world. Each day, for a sublime minute, the earth covered by night rests on the rising sun. Dea, blind, felt a like return of warmth and hope within her when she placed her hand on the head of Gwynplaine.

  To adore each other in the shadows, to love in the plenitude of silence--who could not become reconciled to such an eternity?

  One evening Gwynplaine, feeling within him that overflow of felicity, which, like the intoxication of perfumes, causes a sort of delicious faintness, was strolling, as he usually did after the performance, in the meadow some hundred paces from the Green Box. Sometimes in those high tides of feeling in our souls we feel that we would fain pour out the sensations of the overflowing heart. The night was dark but clear. The stars were shining. The whole fair-ground was deserted. Sleep and forgetfulness reigned in the caravans which were scattered over Tarrinzeau Field.

  One light alone was unextinguished. It was the lamp of the Tadcaster Inn, the door of which was left ajar to admit Gwynplaine on his return.

  Midnight had just struck in the five parishes of Southwark, with the breaks and differences of tone of their various bells.

  Gwynplaine was dreaming of Dea. Of whom else should he dream? But that evening, feeling singularly troubled, and full of a charm which was at the same time a pang, he thought of Dea as a man thinks of a woman. He reproached himself for this. It seemed to be failing. in respect to her. The husband's attack was forming dimly within him. Sweet and imperious impatience! He was crossing the invisible frontier, on this side of which is the virgin, on the other, the wife. He questioned himself anxiously. A blush, as it were, overspread his mind. The Gwynplaine of long ago had been transformed, by degrees, unconsciously in a mysterious growth. His old modesty was becoming misty and uneasy. We have an ear of light, into which speaks the spirit; and an ear of darkness, into which speaks the instinct. Into the latter strange voices were making their proposals. However pure-minded may be the youth who dreams of love, a certain grossness of the flesh eventually comes between his dream and him. Intentions lose their transparency. The unavowed desire implanted by nature enters into his conscience. Gwynplaine felt an indescribable yearning of the flesh, which abounds in all temptation, and Dea was scarcely flesh. In this fever, which he knew to be unhealthy, he transfigured Dea into a more material aspect, and tried to exaggerate her seraphic form into feminine loveliness. It is thou, O woman, that we require. Love comes not to permit too much of paradise. It requires the fevered skin, the troubled life, the unbound hair, the kiss electrical and irreparable, the clasp of desire. The sidereal is embarrassing, the ethereal is heavy.

  Too much of the heavenly in love is like too much fuel on a fire: the flame suffers from it. Gwynplaine fell into an exquisite nightmare; Dea to be clasped in his arms--Dea clasped in them! He heard nature in his heart crying out for a Woman. Like a Pygmalion in a dream modelling a Galatea out of the azure, in the depths of his soul he worked at the chaste contour of Dea; a contour with too much of heaven, too little of Eden. For Eden is Eve, and Eve was a female, a carnal mother, a terrestrial nurse; the sacred womb of generations; the breast of unfailing milk; the rocker of the cradle of the new-born world, and wings are incompatible with the bosom of woman. Virginity is but the hope of maternity. Still, in Gwynplaine's dreams Dea, until now, had been enthroned above flesh. Now, however, he made wild efforts in thought to draw her downward by that thread, sex, which ties every gir
l to earth. Not one of those birds is free. Dea, like all the rest, was within this law; and Gwynplaine, though he scarcely acknowledged it, felt a vague desire that she should submit to it. This desire possessed him in spite of himself, and with an ever-recurring relapse. He pictured Dea as woman. He came to the point of regarding her under a hitherto unheard-of form; as a creature no longer of ecstasy only, but of voluptuousness; as Dea, with her head resting on the pillow. He was ashamed of this visionary desecration. It was like an attempt at profanation. He resisted its assault. He turned from it, but it returned again. He felt as if he were committing a criminal assault. To him, Dea was encompassed by a cloud. Cleaving that cloud, he shuddered, as though he were raising her chemise. It was in April.

  The spine has its dreams.

  He rambled at random with the uncertain step caused by solitude. To have no one by is a provocative to wander. Whither flew his thoughts? He would not have dared to own it to himself. To heaven? No. To a bed. You were looking down upon him, O ye stars.

  Why talk of a man in love? Rather say a man possessed. To be possessed by the devil is the exception; to be possessed by a woman, the rule. Every man has to bear this alienation of himself. What a sorceress is a pretty woman! The true name of love is captivity.

  Man is made prisoner by the soul of a woman. By her flesh as well, and sometimes even more by the flesh than by the soul. The soul is the true-love, the flesh, the mistress.

  We slander the devil. It was not he who tempted Eve. It was Eve who tempted him. The woman began.

  Lucifer was passing by quietly. He perceived the woman, and became Satan.

  The flesh is the cover of the unknown. It is provocative (which is strange) by its modesty. Nothing could be more distracting. It is full of shame, the hussy!

  It was the terrible love of the surface which was then agitating Gwynplaine, and holding him in his power. Fearful the moment in which man covets the nakedness of woman. What dark things lurk beneath the fairness of Venus!

  Something within him was calling Dea aloud, Dea the maiden, Dea the other half of a man, Dea flesh and blood, Dea with uncovered bosom. That cry was almost driving away the angel. Mysterious crisis through which all love must pass and in which the Ideal is in danger! Therein is the predestination of Creation.

  Moment of heavenly corruption!

  Gwynplaine's love of Dea was becoming nuptial. Virgin love is but a transition. The moment was come. Gwynplaine coveted the woman.

  He coveted a woman!

  Precipice of which one sees but the first gentle slope!

  The indistinct summons of nature is inexorable.

  The whole of woman, what an abyss!

  Luckily, there was no woman for Gwynplaine but Dea. The only one he desired. The only one who could desire him.

  Gwynplaine felt that vague and mighty shudder which is the vital claim of infinity.

  Besides there was the aggravation of the spring. He was breathing the nameless odours of the starry darkness. He walked forward in a wild feeling of delight. The wandering perfumes of the rising sap, the heady irradiations which float in shadow, the distant opening of nocturnal flowers, the complicity of little hidden nests, the murmurs of waters and of leaves, soft sighs rising from all things, the freshness, the warmth, and the mysterious awakening of April and May, are the vast diffusion of sex murmuring, in whispers, their proposals of voluptuousness, till the soul stammers in answer to the giddy provocation. The ideal no longer knows what it is saying.

  Any one observing Gwynplaine's walk would have said, "See!--a drunken man!"

  He almost staggered under the weight of his own heart, of spring and of the night.

  The solitude in the bowling-green was so peaceful that at times he spoke aloud.

  The consciousness that there is no listener induces speech.

  He walked slowly, his head bent down, his hands behind him, the left hand in the right, the fingers open.

  Suddenly he felt something slipped between his fingers.

  He turned round quickly.

  In his hand was a paper, and in front of him a man.

  It was the man who, coming behind him with the stealth of a cat, had placed the paper in his fingers.

  The paper was a letter.

  The man, as he appeared pretty clearly in the starlight, was small, chubby-cheeked, young, sedate, and dressed in a scarlet livery, exposed from top to toe through the opening of a long gray cloak, then called a capenoche, a Spanish word contracted; in French it was cape-de-nuit. His head was covered by a crimson cap, like the skull-cap of a cardinal, on which servitude was indicated by a strip of lace. On this cap was a plume of tissern feathers.

  He stood motionless before Gwynplaine, like a dark outline in a dream.

  Gwynplaine recognised the duchess's page.

  Before Gwynplaine could utter an exclamation of surprise, he heard the thin voice of the page, at once child-like and feminine in its tone, saying to him:

  "At this hour to-morrow, be at the corner of London Bridge. I will be there to conduct you----"

  "Whither"' demanded Gwynplaine.

  "Where you are expected."

  Gwynplaine dropped his eyes on the letter, which he was holding mechanically in his hand.

  When he looked up, the page was no longer with him.

  He perceived a vague form lessening rapidly in the distance. It was the little valet. He turned the corner of the street, and solitude reigned again.

  Gwynplaine saw the page vanish, then looked at the letter. There are moments in our lives when what happens seems not to happen. Stupor keeps us for a moment at a distance from the fact. Gwynplaine raised the letter to his eyes, as if to read it, but soon perceived that he could not do so for two reasons--first, because he had not broken the seal, and, secondly, because it was too dark. It was some minutes before he remembered that there was a lamp at the inn. He took a few steps sidewise, as if he knew not whither he was going.

  A somnambulist, to whom a phantom had given a letter, might walk as he did.

  At last he made up his mind. He ran, rather than walked, toward the inn, stood in the light which broke through the half-open door, and by it again examined the closed letter. There was no design on the seal, and on the envelope was written, "To Gwynplaine." He broke the seal, tore the envelope, unfolded the letter, put it directly under the light, and read as follows:

  "You are hideous; I am beautiful. You are a player; I am a duchess. I am the highest; you are the lowest. I desire you! I love you! Come!"

  * * *

  BOOK 4

  THE CELL OF TORTURE

  I

  THE TEMPTATION OF ST. GWYNPLAINE

  ONE JET of flame hardly makes a prick in the darkness; another sets fire to a volcano.

  Some sparks are gigantic.

  Gwynplaine read the letter, then he read it over again. Yes, the words were there, "I love you!"

  Terrors chased each other through his mind.

  The first was, that he believed himself to be mad.

  He was mad; that was certain. He had just seen what had no existence. The twilight spectres were making game of him, poor wretch. The little man in scarlet was the will-o'-the-wisp of a dream. Sometimes, at night, nothings condensed into flame come and laugh at us. Having had his laugh out, the visionary being had disappeared, and left Gwynplaine behind him, mad. Such are the freaks of darkness.

  The second terror was, to find out that he was in his right senses.

  A vision? Certainly not. How could that be? Had he not a letter in his hand? Did he not see an envelope, a seal, paper, and writing? Did he not know from whom that came? It was all clear enough. Some one took a pen and ink, and wrote. Some one lighted a taper, and sealed it with wax. Was not his name written on the letter--"To Gwynplaine"? The paper was scented. All was clear. Gwynplaine knew the little man. The dwarf was a page. The gleam was a livery. The page had given him a rendezvous for the same hour on the morrow, at the corner of London Bridge. Was London Bridge an ill
usion? No, no. All was clear. There was no delirium. All was reality. Gwynplaine was perfectly clear in his intellect It was not a phantasmagoria, suddenly dissolving above his head, and faded into nothingness. It was something which had really happened to him. No, Gwynplaine was not mad, nor was he dreaming. Again he read the letter.

  Well; yes! But then?

  That then was terror-striking.

  There was a woman who desired him! If so, let no one ever again pronounce the word incredible! A woman desire him! A woman who had seen his face! A woman who was not blind! And who was this woman? An ugly one? No; a beauty. A gypsy? No; a duchess!