With this mask, Gwynplaine becomes an acrobat, highly popular with audiences. Since childhood he has been in love with Dea, a blind girl who performs with him. Gwynplaine had eyes for only one woman in the whole world—that blind creature. Dea idolized Gwynplaine. She would touch him and say, “How beautiful you are.”
Until two things happen. Lady Josiane, the queen’s sister, adored by all the gentlemen of the court for her beauty, sees Gwynplaine at the theater, sends him a letter: “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!”
Gwynplaine grapples between his feelings of excitement and desire, and his love for Dea. Then something happens. He thinks he has been arrested. He is questioned, and brought face to face with a bandit who is dying; in short, all of a sudden he has been recognized as Lord Fermain Clancharlie, baron of Clancharlie and Hunkerville, marquis of Corleone in Sicily, and an English peer, who had been kidnapped and disfigured at a tender age in a family feud.
We move onward by leaps and bounds, as Gwynplaine suddenly finds himself propelled from the gutter to the stars, hardly realizing what is going on, except that at a certain point he finds himself, extravagantly dressed, in the room of a palace that, he is told, is his.
It seems to him like an enchanted palace, and already the series of marvels he discovers there (alone in the resplendent desert), the succession of halls and chambers, is bewildering not only to him but to the reader. It is no coincidence that the title of the chapter is “The Resemblance of a Palace to a Wood,” and the description of what seems like the Louvre or the Hermitage takes up five or six pages (depending on the edition). Gwynplaine wanders, dazed, from room to room until he reaches an alcove where, on the bed, beside a tub of water made ready for a virginal bath, he sees a naked woman.
Not literally naked, Hugo tells us. She is clothed. But the description of this clothed woman, especially if we see her through the eyes of Gwynplaine, who has never seen a naked woman, certainly represents one of the heights of erotic literature.
At the center of this web, where one might expect a spider, Gwynplaine saw a formidable object—a woman naked.
Not literally naked. She was dressed. And dressed from head to foot. The dress was a long chemise, so long that it floated over her feet, like the dresses of angels in holy pictures, but so fine that it seemed liquid. From here, the appearance of female nudity, more treacherous and dangerous than real nudity . . . The silver tissue, transparent as glass, was a curtain. It was fastened only at the ceiling, could be lifted aside . . . On that bed, which was silver like the bath and the canopy, lay the woman. She was asleep . . .
Between her nudity and his gaze there were two obstacles, her chemise and the silver veil, two transparencies. The room, more an alcove than a room, was lit with a sort of discretion from the light reflected from the bathroom. The woman may have had no modesty, but the lighting did. The bed had neither columns nor canopy, so that the woman, when she opened her eyes, could see herself a thousand times naked in the mirrors above her. Gwynplaine saw only the woman. He recognized her. She was the duchess. Again he saw her, and saw her terrible.
A woman naked is a woman armed . . . That immodesty was merged in splendor. That creature lay naked with the same calm of one with the divine right of cynicism. She had the security of an Olympian who knew that she was daughter of the depths, and might say to the ocean, “Father!” And she exposed herself, unattainable and proud, to everything that should pass—to looks, to desires, to ravings, to dreams; as proud in her languor, on her boudoir couch, as Venus in the immensity of foam. (part 2, book 7, chapter 3)
And so Josiane awakens, recognizes Gwynplaine, and begins a furious seduction, which the poor man can no longer resist, except that she brings him to the peak of desire but does not yield. She erupts into a series of fantasies, more stimulating than her own nudity, in which she reveals herself as a virgin (as she still is) and a prostitute, anxious to enjoy not only the pleasures of the teratology that Gwynplaine promises her, but also the thrill of defying the world and the court, a prospect that intoxicates her. She is a Venus awaiting the double orgasm of private possession and public exhibition of her Vulcan:
“I feel degraded in your presence, and oh, what happiness that is! How insipid it is to be a grandee! I am noble; what can be more tiresome? Disgrace is a comfort. I am so satiated with respect that I long for contempt.
“I love you, not only because you are deformed, but because you are low. I love monsters, and I love mountebanks. A lover despised, mocked, grotesque, hideous, exposed to laughter on that pillory called a theater, has for me an extraordinary attraction. It is tasting the fruit of hell. An infamous lover, how exquisite! To taste the apple, not of Paradise, but of hell—such is my temptation. It is for that I hunger and thirst. I am that Eve, the Eve of the depths. Probably you are, unknown to yourself, a devil. I am in love with a nightmare. You are a moving puppet, of which the strings are pulled by a specter. You are the incarnation of infernal mirth . . . Gwynplaine, I am the throne; you are the footstool. Let us join on the same level. Oh, how happy I am in my fall! I wish all the world could know how abject I am become. It would bow down all the lower. The more man abhors, the more does he cringe. It is human nature. Hostile, but reptile; dragon, but worm. Oh, I am as depraved as are the gods! . . . Now, you are not ugly; you are deformed. Ugliness is mean, deformity is grand. Ugliness is the devil’s grin behind beauty; deformity is the reverse of sublimity.
“I love you!” she cried. And she bit him with a kiss. (part 2, book 7, chapter 4)
Just as Gwynplaine is about to yield, a message arrives from the queen, telling her sister that the Man Who Laughs has been recognized as the rightful Lord Clancharlie and that he is to be her husband. Josiane comments, “Be it so.” She gets up, gives him her hand (moving from familiar to formal address), saying “Get out” to the man she had so wildly sought to seduce, and adds: “Since you are my husband, get out . . . You have no right to be here; this place is for my lover.”
Gwynplaine is excessive in his disfigurement; Josiane is excessive in her initial sadomasochism, excessive in her reaction. There is another reversal in the situation, which has already been reversed through a normal recognition device (you are not an acrobat but a lord) and added to by a double change of fortune (you were a wretch, now you are not only a lord but desired by the most beautiful woman in the realm, whom you too now desire with all your confused and disturbed soul)—and this would be enough as comedy, if not as tragedy. The reversal, however, is not into tragedy (at least not for the moment: Gwynplaine will kill himself only at the end), but into a grotesque farce. The reader is exhausted and, all of a sudden, understands the threads of Destiny as well as the weave of gallant society of that century. Hugo has no shame: compared to him, Josiane is as prim as a saint.
And now we come to the other reversal of fortune. Gwynplaine —who, after the episode with Josiane, had already begun to understand the laws and powers and customs that she represents—enters the House of Lords and is greeted with suspicion and curiosity. He does nothing to make himself accepted; indeed, at the first vote he stands up and makes a passionate appeal in support of the people, and against the aristocracy who are exploiting them. It is a passage worthy of Marx’s Das Kapital, but when spoken with a face that laughs even when it is expressing scorn, passion, pain, and love for the truth, it stirs not scorn but hilarity.
The sitting ends in fun and laughter, Gwynplaine understands that this cannot be his world, and after a desperate search, returns to Dea. She, alas, suffering more from the loss of her lover than from the illness that has afflicted her for some time, dies happily in his arms. Gwynplaine does not hold back. Divided between two worlds—one that disowns him and the other that has gone—he kills himself. Thus, in Gwynplaine, the quintessential Romantic hero, we find a synthesis of all the elements of the Romantic novel: purest passion, the temptation and fascination of sin, the rapid reversals of fortune with his passage from the depths of poverty to the magnificence of the court, his titanic rebellion against the world of injustice, his
