The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo

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THE MAN WHO LAUGHS

A Romance of English History

By

VICTOR HUGO

CONTENTS

Preliminary Chapter.--Ursus
Another Preliminary Chapter.--The Comprachicos

PART I.

BOOK THE FIRST.--NIGHT NOT SO BLACK AS MAN.

I. Portland Bill
II. Left Alone
III. Alone
IV. Questions
V. The Tree of Human Invention
VI. Struggle between Death and Night
VII. The North Point of Portland

BOOK THE SECOND.--THE HOOKER AT SEA.

I. Superhuman Laws
II. Our First Rough Sketches Filled in
III. Troubled Men on the Troubled Sea
IV. A Cloud Different from the Others enters on the Scene
V. Hardquanonne
VI. They Think that Help is at Hand
VII. Superhuman Horrors
VIII. Nix et Nox
IX. The Charge Confided to a Raging Sea
X. The Colossal Savage, the Storm
XI. The Caskets
XII. Face to Face with the Rock
XIII. Face to Face with Night
XIV. Ortach
XV. Portentosum Mare
XVI. The Problem Suddenly Works in Silence
XVII. The Last Resource
XVIII. The Highest Resource

BOOK THE THIRD.--THE CHILD IN THE SHADOW.

I. Chesil
II. The Effect of Snow
III. A Burden Makes a Rough Road Rougher
IV. Another Form of Desert
V. Misanthropy Plays Its Pranks
VI. The Awaking

PART II.

BOOK THE FIRST.--THE EVERLASTING PRESENCE OF THE PAST. MAN REFLECTS MAN.

I. Lord Clancharlie
II. Lord David Dirry-Moir
III. The Duchess Josiana
IV. The Leader of Fashion
V. Queen Anne
VI. Barkilphedro
VII. Barkilphedro Gnaws His Way
VIII. Inferi
IX. Hate is as Strong as Love
X. The Flame which would be Seen if Man were Transparent
XI. Barkilphedro in Ambuscade
XII. Scotland, Ireland, and England

BOOK THE SECOND.--GWYNPLAINE AND DEA.

I. Wherein we see the Face of Him of whom we have hitherto seen only
the Acts
II. Dea
III. "Oculos non Habet, et Videt"
IV. Well-matched Lovers
V. The Blue Sky through the Black Cloud
VI. Ursus as Tutor, and Ursus as Guardian
VII. Blindness Gives Lessons in Clairvoyance
VIII. Not only Happiness, but Prosperity
IX. Absurdities which Folks without Taste call Poetry
X. An Outsider's View of Men and Things
XI. Gwynplaine Thinks Justice, and Ursus Talks Truth
XII. Ursus the Poet Drags on Ursus the Philosopher

BOOK THE THIRD.--THE BEGINNING OF THE FISSURE.

I. The Tadcaster Inn
II. Open-Air Eloquence
III. Where the Passer-by Reappears
IV. Contraries Fraternize in Hate
V. The Wapentake
VI. The Mouse Examined by the Cats
VII. Why Should a Gold Piece Lower Itself by Mixing with a Heap of
Pennies?
VIII. Symptoms of Poisoning
IX. Abyssus Abyssum Vocat

BOOK THE FOURTH.--THE CELL OF TORTURE.

I. The Temptation of St. Gwynplaine
II. From Gay to Grave
III. Lex, Rex, Fex
IV. Ursus Spies the Police
V. A Fearful Place
VI. The Kind of Magistracy under the Wigs of Former Days
VII. Shuddering
VIII. Lamentation

BOOK THE FIFTH.--THE SEA AND FATE ARE MOVED BY THE SAME BREATH.

I. The Durability of Fragile Things
II. The Waif Knows Its Own Course
III. An Awakening
IV. Fascination
V. We Think We Remember; We Forget

BOOK THE SIXTH.--URSUS UNDER DIFFERENT ASPECTS.

I. What the Misanthrope said
II. What He did
III. Complications
IV. Moenibus Surdis Campana Muta
V. State Policy Deals with Little Matters as Well as with Great

BOOK THE SEVENTH.--THE TITANESS.

I. The Awakening
II. The Resemblance of a Palace to a Wood
III. Eve
IV. Satan
V. They Recognize, but do not Know, Each Other

BOOK THE EIGHTH.--THE CAPITOL AND THINGS AROUND IT.

I. Analysis of Majestic Matters
II. Impartiality
III. The Old Hall
IV. The Old Chamber
V. Aristocratic Gossip
VI. The High and the Low
VII. Storms of Men are Worse than Storms of Oceans
VIII. He would be a Good Brother, were he not a Good Son

BOOK THE NINTH.--IN RUINS.

I. It is through Excess of Greatness that Man reaches Excess of
Misery
II. The Dregs

CONCLUSION.--THE NIGHT AND THE SEA.

I. A Watch-dog may be a Guardian Angel
II. Barkilphedro, having aimed at the Eagle, brings down the Dove
III. Paradise Regained Below
IV. Nay; on High!

PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.

URSUS.

I.

Ursus and Homo were fast friends. Ursus was a man, Homo a wolf. Their
dispositions tallied. It was the man who had christened the wolf:
probably he had also chosen his own name. Having found _Ursus_ fit for
himself, he had found _Homo_ fit for the beast. Man and wolf turned
their partnership to account at fairs, at village fetes, at the corners
of streets where passers-by throng, and out of the need which people
seem to feel everywhere to listen to idle gossip and to buy quack
medicine. The wolf, gentle and courteously subordinate, diverted the
crowd. It is a pleasant thing to behold the tameness of animals. Our
greatest delight is to see all the varieties of domestication parade
before us. This it is which collects so many folks on the road of royal
processions.

Ursus and Homo went about from cross-road to cross-road, from the High
Street of Aberystwith to the High Street of Jedburgh, from country-side
to country-side, from shire to shire, from town to town. One market
exhausted, they went on to another. Ursus lived in a small van upon
wheels, which Homo was civilized enough to draw by day and guard by
night. On bad roads, up hills, and where there were too many ruts, or
there was too much mud, the man buckled the trace round his neck and
pulled fraternally, side by side with the wolf. They had thus grown old
together. They encamped at haphazard on a common, in the glade of a
wood, on the waste patch of grass where roads intersect, at the
outskirts of villages, at the gates of towns, in market-places, in
public walks, on the borders of parks, before the entrances of churches.
When the cart drew up on a fair green, when the gossips ran up
open-mouthed and the curious made a circle round the pair, Ursus
harangued and Homo approved. Homo, with a bowl in his mouth, politely
made a collection among the audience. They gained their livelihood. The
wolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by the
man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which
swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man,"
his friend would say to him.

Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then. At least, to bite was
the intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope, and to italicize his
misanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also; for the
stomach has to be consulted. Moreover, this juggler-misanthrope, whether
to add to the complexity of his being or to perfect it, was a doctor. To
be a doctor is little: Ursus was a ventriloquist. You heard him speak
without his moving his lips. He counterfeited, so as to deceive you, any
one's accent or pronunciation. He imitated voices so exactly that you
believed you heard the people themselves. All alone he simulated the
murmur of a crowd, and this gave him a right to the title of
Engastrimythos, which he took. He reproduced all sorts of cries of
birds, as of the thrush, the wren, the pipit lark, otherwise called the
gray cheeper, and the ring ousel, all travellers like himself: so that
at times when the fancy struck him, he made you aware either of a public
thoroughfare filled with the uproar of men, or of a meadow loud with the
voices of beasts--at one time stormy as a multitude, at another fresh
and serene as the dawn. Such gifts, although rare, exist. In the last
century a man called Touzel, who imitated the mingled utterances of men
and animals, and who counterfeited all the cries of beasts, was
attached to the person of Buffon--to serve as a menagerie.

Ursus was sagacious, contradictory, odd, and inclined to the singular
expositions which we term fables. He had the appearance of believing in
them, and this impudence was a part of his humour. He read people's
hands, opened books at random and drew conclusions, told fortunes,
taught that it is perilous to meet a black mare, still more perilous, as
you start for a journey, to hear yourself accosted by one who knows not
whither you are going; and he called himself a dealer in superstitions.
He used to say: "There is one difference between me and the Archbishop
of Canterbury: I avow what I am." Hence it was that the archbishop,
justly indignant, had him one day before him; but Ursus cleverly
disarmed his grace by reciting a sermon he had composed upon Christmas
Day, which the delighted archbishop learnt by heart, and delivered from
the pulpit as his own. In consideration thereof the archbishop pardoned
Ursus.

As a doctor, Ursus wrought cures by some means or other. He made use of
aromatics; he was versed in simples; he made the most of the immense
power which lies in a heap of neglected plants, such as the hazel, the
catkin, the white alder, the white bryony, the mealy-tree, the
traveller's joy, the buckthorn. He treated phthisis with the sundew; at
opportune moments he would use the leaves of the spurge, which plucked
at the bottom are a purgative and plucked at the top, an emetic. He
cured sore throat by means of the vegetable excrescence called Jew's
ear. He knew the rush which cures the ox and the mint which cures the
horse. He was well acquainted with the beauties and virtues of the herb
mandragora, which, as every one knows, is of both sexes. He had many
recipes. He cured burns with the salamander wool, of which, according to
Pliny, Nero had a napkin. Ursus possessed a retort and a flask; he
effected transmutations; he sold panaceas. It was said of him that he
had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour
to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he
was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit
to some such legend about us.

The fact is, Ursus was a bit of a savant, a man of taste, and an old
Latin poet. He was learned in two forms; he Hippocratized and he
Pindarized. He could have vied in bombast with Rapin and Vida. He could
have composed Jesuit tragedies in a style not less triumphant than that
of Father Bouhours. It followed from his familiarity with the venerable
rhythms and metres of the ancients, that he had peculiar figures of
speech, and a whole family of classical metaphors. He would say of a
mother followed by her two daughters, _There is a dactyl_; of a father
preceded by his two sons, _There is an anapaest_; and of a little child
walking between its grandmother and grandfather, _There is an
amphimacer_. So much knowledge could only end in starvation. The school
of Salerno says, "Eat little and often." Ursus ate little and seldom,
thus obeying one half the precept and disobeying the other; but this was
the fault of the public, who did not always flock to him, and who did
not often buy.

Ursus was wont to say: "The expectoration of a sentence is a relief. The
wolf is comforted by its howl, the sheep by its wool, the forest by its
finch, woman by her love, and the philosopher by his epiphonema." Ursus
at a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but acted; this
helped to sell the drugs. Among other works, he had composed an heroic
pastoral in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, who in 1608 brought a river to
London. The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty miles
from London: the knight came and took possession of it. He brought a
brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pickaxes; set to
breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it in
another--now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made wooden
aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundred
bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river entered
London, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgar
details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, in
which the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her his
bed, saying, "I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to pay
them"--an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh
Middleton had completed the work at his own expense.

Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once unsociable and
talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some
one, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who has
lived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one's
nature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue space is an
outlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue
with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of
Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus took after
those great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty of being his own
audience. He questioned himself, answered himself, praised himself,
blamed himself. You heard him in the street soliloquizing in his van.
The passers-by, who have their own way of appreciating clever people,
used to say: He is an idiot. As we have just observed, he abused himself
at times; but there were times also when he rendered himself justice.
One day, in one of these allocutions addressed to himself, he was heard
to cry out, "I have studied vegetation in all its mysteries--in the
stalk, in the bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the carpel, in the
ovule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the apothecium. I have
thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy--that is to say, the
formation of colours, of smell, and of taste." There was something
fatuous, doubtless, in this certificate which Ursus gave to Ursus; but
let those who have not thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy
cast the first stone at him.

Fortunately Ursus had never gone into the Low Countries; there they
would certainly have weighed him, to ascertain whether he was of the
normal weight, above or below which a man is a sorcerer. In Holland this
weight was sagely fixed by law. Nothing was simpler or more ingenious.
It was a clear test. They put you in a scale, and the evidence was
conclusive if you broke the equilibrium. Too heavy, you were hanged; too
light, you were burned. To this day the scales in which sorcerers were
weighed may be seen at Oudewater, but they are now used for weighing
cheeses; how religion has degenerated! Ursus would certainly have had a
crow to pluck with those scales. In his travels he kept away from
Holland, and he did well. Indeed, we believe that he used never to leave
the United Kingdom.

However this may have been, he was very poor and morose, and having made
the acquaintance of Homo in a wood, a taste for a wandering life had
come over him. He had taken the wolf into partnership, and with him had
gone forth on the highways, living in the open air the great life of
chance. He had a great deal of industry and of reserve, and great skill
in everything connected with healing operations, restoring the sick to
health, and in working wonders peculiar to himself. He was considered a
clever mountebank and a good doctor. As may be imagined, he passed for a
wizard as well--not much indeed; only a little, for it was unwholesome
in those days to be considered a friend of the devil. To tell the truth,
Ursus, by his passion for pharmacy and his love of plants, laid himself
open to suspicion, seeing that he often went to gather herbs in rough
thickets where grew Lucifer's salads, and where, as has been proved by
the Counsellor De l'Ancre, there is a risk of meeting in the evening
mist a man who comes out of the earth, "blind of the right eye,
barefooted, without a cloak, and a sword by his side." But for the
matter of that, Ursus, although eccentric in manner and disposition, was
too good a fellow to invoke or disperse hail, to make faces appear, to
kill a man with the torment of excessive dancing, to suggest dreams fair
or foul and full of terror, and to cause the birth of cocks with four
wings. He had no such mischievous tricks. He was incapable of certain
abominations, such as, for instance, speaking German, Hebrew, or Greek,
without having learned them, which is a sign of unpardonable wickedness,
or of a natural infirmity proceeding from a morbid humour. If Ursus
spoke Latin, it was because he knew it. He would never have allowed
himself to speak Syriac, which he did not know. Besides, it is asserted
that Syriac is the language spoken in the midnight meetings at which
uncanny people worship the devil. In medicine he justly preferred Galen
to Cardan; Cardan, although a learned man, being but an earthworm to
Galen.

To sum up, Ursus was not one of those persons who live in fear of the
police. His van was long enough and wide enough to allow of his lying
down in it on a box containing his not very sumptuous apparel. He owned
a lantern, several wigs, and some utensils suspended from nails, among
which were musical instruments. He possessed, besides, a bearskin with
which he covered himself on his days of grand performance. He called
this putting on full dress. He used to say, "I have two skins; this is
the real one," pointing to the bearskin.

The little house on wheels belonged to himself and to the wolf. Besides
his house, his retort, and his wolf, he had a flute and a violoncello on
which he played prettily. He concocted his own elixirs. His wits yielded
him enough to sup on sometimes. In the top of his van was a hole,
through which passed the pipe of a cast-iron stove; so close to his box
as to scorch the wood of it. The stove had two compartments; in one of
them Ursus cooked his chemicals, and in the other his potatoes. At night
the wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain. Homo's hair
was black, that of Ursus, gray; Ursus was fifty, unless, indeed, he was
sixty. He accepted his destiny, to such an extent that, as we have just
seen, he ate potatoes, the trash on which at that time they fed pigs and
convicts. He ate them indignant, but resigned. He was not tall--he was
long. He was bent and melancholy. The bowed frame of an old man is the
settlement in the architecture of life. Nature had formed him for
sadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been able to
weep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears as well as of
the palliative of joy. An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruin
was Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a
prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was Ursus. In his
youth he had been a philosopher in the house of a lord.

This was 180 years ago, when men were more like wolves than they are
now.

Not so very much though.

II.

Homo was no ordinary wolf. From his appetite for medlars and potatoes he
might have been taken for a prairie wolf; from his dark hide, for a
lycaon; and from his howl prolonged into a bark, for a dog of Chili. But
no one has as yet observed the eyeball of a dog of Chili sufficiently to
enable us to determine whether he be not a fox, and Homo was a real
wolf. He was five feet long, which is a fine length for a wolf, even in
Lithuania; he was very strong; he looked at you askance, which was not
his fault; he had a soft tongue, with which he occasionally licked
Ursus; he had a narrow brush of short bristles on his backbone, and he
was lean with the wholesome leanness of a forest life. Before he knew
Ursus and had a carriage to draw, he thought nothing of doing his fifty
miles a night. Ursus meeting him in a thicket near a stream of running
water, had conceived a high opinion of him from seeing the skill and
sagacity with which he fished out crayfish, and welcomed him as an
honest and genuine Koupara wolf of the kind called crab-eater.

As a beast of burden, Ursus preferred Homo to a donkey. He would have
felt repugnance to having his hut drawn by an ass; he thought too highly
of the ass for that. Moreover he had observed that the ass, a
four-legged thinker little understood by men, has a habit of cocking his
ears uneasily when philosophers talk nonsense. In life the ass is a
third person between our thoughts and ourselves, and acts as a
restraint. As a friend, Ursus preferred Homo to a dog, considering that
the love of a wolf is more rare.

Hence it was that Homo sufficed for Ursus. Homo was for Ursus more than
a companion, he was an analogue. Ursus used to pat the wolf's empty
ribs, saying: "I have found the second volume of myself!" Again he
said, "When I am dead, any one wishing to know me need only study Homo.
I shall leave a true copy behind me."

The English law, not very lenient to beasts of the forest, might have
picked a quarrel with the wolf, and have put him to trouble for his
assurance in going freely about the towns: but Homo took advantage of
the immunity granted by a statute of Edward IV. to servants: "Every
servant in attendance on his master is free to come and go." Besides, a
certain relaxation of the law had resulted with regard to wolves, in
consequence of its being the fashion of the ladies of the Court, under
the later Stuarts, to have, instead of dogs, little wolves, called
adives, about the size of cats, which were brought from Asia at great
cost.

Ursus had communicated to Homo a portion of his talents: such as to
stand upright, to restrain his rage into sulkiness, to growl instead of
howling, etc.; and on his part, the wolf had taught the man what _he_
knew--to do without a roof, without bread and fire, to prefer hunger in
the woods to slavery in a palace.

The van, hut, and vehicle in one, which traversed so many different
roads, without, however, leaving Great Britain, had four wheels, with
shafts for the wolf and a splinter-bar for the man. The splinter-bar
came into use when the roads were bad. The van was strong, although it
was built of light boards like a dove-cot. In front there was a glass
door with a little balcony used for orations, which had something of the
character of the platform tempered by an air of the pulpit. At the back
there was a door with a practicable panel. By lowering the three steps
which turned on a hinge below the door, access was gained to the hut,
which at night was securely fastened with bolt and lock. Rain and snow
had fallen plentifully on it; it had been painted, but of what colour it
was difficult to say, change of season being to vans what changes of
reign are to courtiers. In front, outside, was a board, a kind of
frontispiece, on which the following inscription might once have been
deciphered; it was in black letters on a white ground, but by degrees
the characters had become confused and blurred:--

"By friction gold loses every year a fourteen hundredth part of its
bulk. This is what is called the Wear. Hence it follows that on fourteen
hundred millions of gold in circulation throughout the world, one
million is lost annually. This million dissolves into dust, flies away,
floats about, is reduced to atoms, charges, drugs, weighs down
consciences, amalgamates with the souls of the rich whom it renders
proud, and with those of the poor whom it renders brutish."

The inscription, rubbed and blotted by the rain and by the kindness of
nature, was fortunately illegible, for it is possible that its
philosophy concerning the inhalation of gold, at the same time both
enigmatical and lucid, might not have been to the taste of the sheriffs,
the provost-marshals, and other big-wigs of the law. English legislation
did not trifle in those days. It did not take much to make a man a
felon. The magistrates were ferocious by tradition, and cruelty was a
matter of routine. The judges of assize increased and multiplied.
Jeffreys had become a breed.

III.

In the interior of the van there were two other inscriptions. Above the
box, on a whitewashed plank, a hand had written in ink as follows:--

"THE ONLY THINGS NECESSARY TO KNOW.

"The Baron, peer of England, wears a cap with six pearls. The coronet
begins with the rank of Viscount. The Viscount wears a coronet of which
the pearls are without number. The Earl a coronet with the pearls upon
points, mingled with strawberry leaves placed low between. The Marquis,
one with pearls and leaves on the same level. The Duke, one with
strawberry leaves alone--no pearls. The Royal Duke, a circlet of crosses
and fleurs de lys. The Prince of Wales, crown like that of the King, but
unclosed.

"The Duke is a most high and most puissant prince, the Marquis and Earl
most noble and puissant lord, the Viscount noble and puissant lord, the
Baron a trusty lord. The Duke is his Grace; the other Peers their
Lordships. _Most honourable_ is higher than _right honourable_.

"Lords who are peers are lords in their own right. Lords who are not
peers are lords by courtesy:--there are no real lords, excepting such as
are peers.

"The House of Lords is a chamber and a court, _Concilium et Curia_,
legislature and court of justice. The Commons, who are the people, when
ordered to the bar of the Lords, humbly present themselves bareheaded
before the peers, who remain covered. The Commons send up their bills by
forty members, who present the bill with three low bows. The Lords send
their bills to the Commons by a mere clerk. In case of disagreement, the
two Houses confer in the Painted Chamber, the Peers seated and covered,
the Commons standing and bareheaded.