of the fact. They were good-humoured; they
saw no use in Gwynplaine. He opened himself to them. He tore out his
heart to show them, and they cried, "Go on with your play!" But,
sharpest sting! he had laughed himself. The frightful chain which tied
down his soul hindered his thoughts from rising to his face. His
disfigurement reached even his senses; and, while his conscience was
indignant, his face gave it the lie, and jested. Then all was over. He
was the laughing man, the caryatid of the weeping world. He was an agony
petrified in hilarity, carrying the weight of a universe of calamity,
and walled up for ever with the gaiety, the ridicule, and the amusement
of others; of all the oppressed, of whom he was the incarnation, he
partook the hateful fate, to be a desolation not believed in; they
jeered at his distress; to them he was but an extraordinary buffoon
lifted out of some frightful condensation of misery, escaped from his
prison, changed to a deity, risen from the dregs of the people to the
foot of the throne, mingling with the stars, and who, having once amused
the damned, now amused the elect. All that was in him of generosity, of
enthusiasm, of eloquence, of heart, of soul, of fury, of anger, of love,
of inexpressible grief, ended in--a burst of laughter! And he proved, as
he had told the lords, that this was not the exception; but that it was
the normal, ordinary, universal, unlimited, sovereign fact, so
amalgamated with the routine of life that they took no account of it.
The hungry pauper laughs, the beggar laughs, the felon laughs, the
prostitute laughs, the orphan laughs to gain his bread; the slave
laughs, the soldier laughs, the people laugh. Society is so constituted
that every perdition, every indigence, every catastrophe, every fever,
every ulcer, every agony, is resolved on the surface of the abyss into
one frightful grin of joy. Now he was that universal grin, and that grin
was himself. The law of heaven, the unknown power which governs, had
willed that a spectre visible and palpable, a spectre of flesh and bone,
should be the synopsis of the monstrous parody which we call the world;
and he was that spectre, immutable fate!

He had cried, "Pity for those who suffer." In vain! He had striven to
awake pity; he had awakened horror. Such is the law of apparitions.

But while he was a spectre, he was also a man; here was the heartrending
complication. A spectre without, a man within. A man more than any