earts adored
each other. One nest and two birds--that was their story. They had
begun to feel a universal law--to please, to seek, and to find each
other.

Thus hatred had made a mistake. The persecutors of Gwynplaine, whoever
they might have been--the deadly enigma, from wherever it came--had
missed their aim. They had intended to drive him to desperation; they
had succeeded in driving him into enchantment. They had affianced him
beforehand to a healing wound. They had predestined him for consolation
by an infliction. The pincers of the executioner had softly
changed into the delicately-moulded hand of a girl. Gwynplaine was
horrible--artificially horrible--made horrible by the hand of man. They
had hoped to exile him for ever: first, from his family, if his family
existed, and then from humanity. When an infant, they had made him a
ruin; of this ruin Nature had repossessed herself, as she does of all
ruins. This solitude Nature had consoled, as she consoles all solitudes.
Nature comes to the succour of the deserted; where all is lacking, she
gives back her whole self. She flourishes and grows green amid ruins;
she has ivy for the stones and love for man.

Profound generosity of the shadows!

CHAPTER V.

THE BLUE SKY THROUGH THE BLACK CLOUD.

Thus lived these unfortunate creatures together--Dea, relying;
Gwynplaine, accepted. These orphans were all in all to each other, the
feeble and the deformed. The widowed were betrothed. An inexpressible
thanksgiving arose out of their distress. They were grateful. To whom?
To the obscure immensity. Be grateful in your own hearts. That suffices.
Thanksgiving has wings, and flies to its right destination. Your prayer
knows its way better than you can.

How many men have believed that they prayed to Jupiter, when they prayed
to Jehovah! How many believers in amulets are listened to by the
Almighty! How many atheists there are who know not that, in the simple
fact of being good and sad, they pray to God!

Gwynplaine and Dea were grateful. Deformity is expulsion. Blindness is a
precipice. The expelled one had been adopted; the precipice was
habitable.

Gwynplaine had seen a brilliant light descending on him, in an
arrangement of destiny which seemed to put, in the perspective of a
dream, a white cloud of beauty having the form of a woman, a radiant
vision in which there was a heart; and the phantom, almost a cloud and
yet a woman, clasped him; and the apparition emb